April 2009 • Number 2

Volume 42 • April 2009 • Number 2

in this issue: Editor’s Notes 1 The Gift of Assurance: The Spirit of Christ and Assurance of Salvation 3 David J. Engelsma Survey of Southern Presbyterian History (2) 47 Eugene Case H i s t o r i c a l I n t r o d u c t i o n t o G u i d o d e B r è s ’ Letter to King Philip II of Spain 77 Russell J. Dykstra Guido deBrès’ Letter to Philip II of Spain, Appended to the Belgic Confession 80 P R O T E S T A N T R E F O R M E D translated by Marvin Kamps T H E O L O G I C A L Process Theology: Philosophical Idolatry 89 S E M I N A R Y Daniel Holstege Book Reviews 117 4949 Ivanrest Avenue Wyoming, Michigan 49418-9142

ISSN 1070-8138 Volume 42 • April 2009 • Number 2 PROTESTANT REFORMED Book Reviews THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 117 Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation 125 Dennison, James T. Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation: Vol. I, Published twice annually by the faculty of the Protestant Re- 1523-1552 formed Theological Seminary: 127 Dennison, James T. The Letters of Geerhardus Vos 137 Hall, David W. and Lillback, Peter A. Theological Ronald L. Cammenga, Editor ([email protected]) Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis Russell J. Dykstra, Book Review Editor ([email protected]) 143 Hyde, Daniel R. With Heart and Mouth: An Exposition Barrett L. Gritters ([email protected]) of the Belgic Confession 146 Mortenson, Terry and Ury, Thane H. Coming to Grips with Genesis: Biblical Authority and the Age of the Earth 149 Smith, Gordon T. The Lord’s Supper: Five Views 154 Taylor, Paul F. The Six Days of Genesis: A Scientific    Appreciation of Chapters 1-11

The Protestant Reformed Theological Journal is published by the Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary twice each year, in April and November, and mailed to subscribers free of charge. Those who wish to receive the Journal should write the editor, at the seminary address. Those who wish to reprint an article appearing in the Journal should secure the permission of the editor. Books for review should be sent to the book review editor, also at the address of the school.

Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary 4949 Ivanrest Avenue Wyoming, MI 49418 USA Editor’s Notes

You have in hand the April 2009 issue of the Protestant Reformed Theological Journal. This is the second and last issue of volume 42—the number of years PRTJ has been published without interruption by the faculty of the Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary. We trust that you will find the articles that are included in this issue informative, edifying, and God-glorifying. Prof. David J. Engelsma, emeritus professor of Dogmatics and Old Testament at PRTS, contributes a timely article on the issue of assurance, “The Gift of Assurance: The Spirit of Christ and Assur- ance of Salvation.” The article contains an explanation and defense of the biblical, Reformed doctrine of assurance. It is also polemical, taking aim particularly at the perverted doctrine of assurance taught by many of the Puritans and the leaders of the Nadere Reformatie, as well as promoted by certain contemporary theologians and churches. We thank our colleague for his very worthwhile piece. This issue also contains the second installment of the first speech presented by the Rev. Eugene Case to the faculty and student body of PRTS in April 2008 on the history and distinctives of Southern Pres- byterianism. In this article Rev. Case continues to trace the history, including the sad decline, of the Southern Presbyterian Church from the beginning of the nineteenth century, through the Civil War, down to the present. But the article is far more than a factual recounting. It is an insightful and critical evaluation of the history, with powerful application to the contemporary church scene. Included in this issue as well is a translation of Guido de Brès’ dedicatory letter to King Philip II of Spain. Mr. Marvin Kamps is the translator. This is a moving piece that has not been widely available in English in the past. The translation is from the original Dutch, with comparison to the French. The translation is preceded by a historical introduction, written by Prof. Russell Dykstra, that sets the dedicatory letter in the context of de Brès life and the struggles of the Reformed churches in the Lowlands at the time that the Belgic Confession of Faith was written. Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Since its beginning, PRTJ has published from time to time papers produced by the seminary students of PRTS. In this issue our readers will find a paper written by third-year seminarian Daniel Holstege. The paper introduces and analyzes critically the powerful movement known as Process Theology. The roots, development, influential proponents, and main tenets of the movement are identified. And the movement is evaluated in the light of Scripture and the Reformed confessions. As always, a number of book reviews make up the last section of this issue of the Journal. The books are significant recent releases, the contents of which are carefully evaluated by our reviewers. A number of our readers have expressed appreciation for the book reviews contained in recent issues, and we trust that these reviews will also prove worthwhile. Ministers, seminary students, and laymen alike will undoubtedly want to purchase a number of these books for their own libraries. Once again, I want to call the attention of our readers to the Calvin Conference that PRTS is planning for the first week in September of this year. The conference theme is: “After 500 Years: John Calvin for Reformed Churches Today.” Take note of the advertisement at the end of this issue, which details the several speeches that are planned. We are excited for the conference and look forward to seeing many of you at the conference. If you have any questions concerning the conference, you can call the seminary or consult the website that has been set up at: 500yearsofcalvin.com. Read and enjoy! Soli Deo Gloria! —RLC.

2 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance The Gift of Assurance: The Spirit of Christ and Assurance of Salvation

David J. Engelsma

Introduction The Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Jesus Christ causes the believing child of God to know his own salvation with certainty. The Spirit gives assurance of salvation. This is an especially vital and precious work of the Spirit. Assurance is an especially vital and important work of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. When in John 14-17 He promised the Holy Spirit to His church, Jesus called this Spirit the “Comforter”: “The Father… shall give you another Comforter” (John 14:16). As the other Com- forter of the church and of the individual member of the church, the Spirit comforts us with the assurance that our sins are forgiven; with the assurance that we have been given by the Father to Jesus Christ as His people; with the assurance that we are united to Christ in the covenant of grace; and with the assurance that one day we will be with Christ where He is in heaven. In short, the Spirit comforts us that we were saved from eternity past, are saved now, and will be saved everlastingly. Lacking this assurance, we are not comforted, but are terribly uncomfortable, indeed, terrified. Failing to give this assurance, the Spirit is no Comforter at all. Indicating how important the assurance of His people by the other Comforter was to Jesus, when He said farewell Jesus declared, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you…. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27). Peace is the experience of being reconciled to God, of being in a relation of friendship with God on the basis of the forgiveness of sins. And this peace for each of us is assurance that God is my friend and Father for Jesus’ sake. There is no peace for anyone, if he lacks assurance of his own

April 2009 3 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal salvation, but only terror. Of course, this peace is due to the work of the Comforter within us assuring us of God’s love for us, Christ’s death for us, and our own personal salvation. Assurance is especially vital and precious to us ourselves. Without assurance, our heart is very much troubled and afraid. Doubt of salvation is the worst fear of all the fears to which humans are liable. Assurance of salvation is an aspect of salvation itself. God wills, not only that we be saved, but also that we know that we are saved. Then, and only then, do we enjoy salvation. Then, and only then, can we praise and thank Him, so that He is glorified by us, which is the ultimate purpose of salvation. One who lacks assurance cannot thank, praise, and glorify God. Salvation itself is experiential, involving our conscious certainty of salvation, for example, justification, the chief benefit of salvation. Justification is not simply the forgiveness of sins. Justification is the forgiveness in the forum of the believer’s consciousness, as the Prot- estant Reformation has taught us. What good is salvation to me, if I do not know it, if I live in doubt of it? What good is the Comforter to me, if I cannot confess, truthfully, concerning myself personally, what the Heidelberg Catechism puts on the lips of every man, woman, and child who believes the gospel of Jesus Christ from the heart in its first question and answer:

[My only comfort in life and death is] that I…belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ, who with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must work together for my salvation.1

1 Heidelberg Catechism, Q. & A. 1, in Philip Schaff, Creeds of Chris- tendom, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Baker, repr. 1966), 307, 308. The explanation of this personal assurance of every believer is given by the Catechism when it adds, “Wherefore, by his Holy Spirit, he [Jesus Christ] also assures me of eternal life.” Assurance is an aspect of Jesus’ saving work, with redemption and preservation. The reason for the Catechism’s confidence that every believer has assurance, so that he can honestly confess the first question and 4 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

Controversy over Assurance It is deplorable that the Spirit’s work of assuring believers and the true, spiritual children of believers is controversial. I do not now refer to the open denial of the possibility of the assurance of salvation by the Roman Catholic Church, by all churches that proclaim the false gospel of Arminianism, and by the proponents of the covenant theology of the Federal [Covenant] Vision in reputedly Reformed and Presbyterian churches. By virtue of their common teaching that salvation is conditional, that is, dependent upon the will and works of the saved sinner, Rome, churches embracing the lie of free will, and the Federal [Covenant] Vision all openly proclaim that saints can fall away into eternal perdition. This is the denial of assurance of salvation with a vengeance.2 But I refer to the controversy over assurance raised by the false answer, is that Jesus assures of eternal life every one whom He has redeemed. For the Catechism, one might as well deprive some whom Christ redeemed of the work of preservation, or of the work of making them willing and ready to live to Christ, as to deprive them of the Spirit’s work of assurance. 2 For Rome’s denial of assurance, see the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Sixth Session (“Decree of Justification”), chapters 12, 13, in Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Broth- ers, 1890), 103, 104; for the Arminian denial of assurance, see the “Opinions of the Remonstrants [Arminians],” D. (“The Opinion of the Remonstrants with respect to the fifth article, which concerns Perseverance”), in Crisis in the Reformed Churches, ed. Peter Y. De Jong (Grand Rapids: Reformed Fellowship, 1968), 227-229; for the denial of assurance by the men of the Federal [Covenant] Vision, see my The Covenant of God and the Children of Believers: Sovereign Grace in the Covenant (Jenison, MI: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 2005), 135-232. A representative statement by a leading spokesman for the Federal [Covenant] Vision is in order: “Those who ultimately prove to be reprobate may be in covenant with God. They may enjoy for a season the blessings of the covenant, including the forgiveness of sins, adoption, possession of the kingdom, sanctification, etc., and yet apostatize and fall short of the grace of God…. The apostate doesn’t forfeit ‘apparent blessings’ that were never his in reality, but real blessings that were his in covenant with God” (Steve Wilkins, quoted in The Covenant of God, 193).

April 2009 5 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal teaching about the Holy Spirit and assurance of many, perhaps the majority, of the Puritans in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. These Puritans taught that the Spirit saves many whom He does not assure of salvation. From many of those whom He does finally assure of salvation He withholds assurance for a long time—years, many years—after their conversion and coming to faith in Jesus Christ. Some regenerated believers never receive the gift of assurance. These miserable souls must live all their troubled life and then die without assurance, without ever being able to confess the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism, even though God elected them, Christ died for them, and the Spirit regenerated them and united them to Christ. Expressions by leading Puritans and the actual condition of churches held in bondage by this teaching leave the distinct impression that those believers who never receive assurance, but die in doubt, are the majority. These Puritans taught that assurance is not so much the gift of the Holy Spirit as it is the work of the church member himself. Hav- ing convinced believers that they (the believers) had not received assurance with their faith, these Puritans then exhorted the believers to pray fervently, to work arduously, and to struggle heroically, often for many years, in order at last, by dint of all this spiritual work, to obtain assurance. These Puritans taught that assurance is, and should be, a real problem for many, if not most, believers and children of believers. It is normal to lack assurance; normal to wonder whether one is really saved; normal to struggle with the question of assurance; normal that one’s relation to assurance is that of a “quest,” a long, even lifelong, “quest,” with no assurance of a favorable outcome of the quest, namely, finding assurance in this life; and, therefore, also, normal to abstain from the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Leading Puritans, men who are highly regarded by contemporary disciples of the Puritans, taught that the Spirit gives assurance only to a very few of God’s children, leaving the rest of us, the vast majority of His children, to live and die in doubt.

Now though this full assurance is earnestly desired, and highly prized,

6 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

and the want of it much lamented, and the enjoyment of it much en- deavored after by all saints, yet it is only obtained by a few. Assurance is a mercy too good for most men’s hearts, it is a crown too weighty for most men’s heads. Assurance is optimum maximum, the best and greatest mercy; and therefore God will only give it to his best and dearest friends. Augustus in his solemn feasts, gave trifles to some, but gold to others. Honor and riches, etc., are trifles that God gives to the worst of men; but assurance is that ‘tried gold,’ Rev. 3:18, that God only gives to tried friends. Among those few that have a share or portion in the special love and favor of God, there are but a very few that have an assurance of his love. It is one mercy for God to love the soul, and another mercy for God to assure the soul of his love.3

A Reformed student of Scripture and the Reformed creeds struggles for words with which to express opposition to, and indignation at, the Puritan doctrine of assurance. It is no doctrine of assurance at all, but a cruel doctrine of doubt, at least, for the great majority of those who “have a share or portion in the special love and favor of God.” Not only does it rob the great majority of God’s believing children of the precious, priceless assurance of the love of God for them and their salvation, shutting them up to the unspeakable misery of the fear, whether God hates them and will damn them at death, but it also casts the gravest aspersions on the Fatherhood of God in Jesus Christ.

3 Thomas Brooks, “Heaven on Earth: A Serious Discourse, Touching a Well-Grounded Assurance,” in The Works of Thomas Brooks, vol. 2 (Edin- burgh: Banner of Truth, repr. 1980), 335. The quotation is given in part in J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1990), 181. Of Thomas Brooks, Puritan scholar J. I. Packer says that he was “one of the greatest of the later Puritans” and one of the “finest Puritan minds.” Packer states that Brooks’ teaching on assurance “represent[s] the main current of Puritan thinking” and is the “particular” aspect of “the Puritans’ most valuable contributions to the church’s theological heritage” (see Packer, 179, 180). In the name of the sixteenth century Reformation of the church, confessional Reformed doctrine, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the comfort of believers and their children, I say no to the Puritan doctrine of assurance. Saying no to the Puritan doctrine of assurance, I am saying no to a teaching that is not incidental, but fundamental, to Puritanism.

April 2009 7 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

What godly, earthly father, loving all his children, gives assurance of his love to a “very few” of his children, but withholds this assurance from the majority of them? Such a father would make himself subject to the discipline of the church on the ground of the grossest derelic- tion of parental duty. Indeed, what earthly father would demand of his children that they “endeavor,” that is, work, for years in order to obtain after many years, or even at the end of life, the assurance that he in fact loves them? What Christian would swallow the assertion that it is one parental mercy for the believing father to love his children, but another parental mercy for the father to assure the children of his love? What strange mercy is it to love one’s children, but have them live in the terror that their father hates them? That God’s Fatherhood does not suffer in comparison with the fatherhood of the godly man is evident from the fact that Jesus taught everyone who believes the gospel, and thus believes on Jesus Christ, from the heart, whether aged saint or new convert, grandparent or little covenant child, to call upon God in prayer and to call upon Him as “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9). To say “Our Father” to God is to express that the one who prays has assurance that God loves him, has redeemed him, saves him, and will preserve him unto eternal glory. Here, according to Puritan theology, is a grace of salvation about which it is not true, that the one who seeks shall find. All believers seek assurance as a grace “earnestly desired and highly prized,” but only a “few,” indeed, a “very few,” ever find it. And the reason is that this grace of salvation, which rightly is “highly prized” as the “best and greatest mercy,” is obtained, not by the free gift of the Spirit of Christ, but by the working and works of the believer. “He that will have it [assurance] must work, and sweat, and weep, and wait to obtain it… none can obtain it [assurance] but such as labor for it…a man must win it [assurance] before he can wear it.”4 The Puritan doctrine of assurance is a form of salvation by works. A doctrine of works is necessarily also a doctrine of doubt. Despite the clear, powerful testimony of the “Three Forms of Unity” against it, the Puritan doctrine of assurance has infected cer-

4 Brooks, 324, 325.

8 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance tain churches in the Dutch Reformed tradition. This occurred largely through the influence of Puritanism upon some Reformed theologians and ministers in the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The movement influenced by Puritanism, particularly the Puritan doctrine of assurance, called itself the “nadere reformatie.” This name should be translated, and understood, as ‘further reformation,’ expressing the movement’s conviction that the sixteenth century Reformation did not do justice to piety and experience and that it was the high calling of the “further reformation” to complete the sixteenth century Reformation. This, the men of the “further reformation” set out to accomplish by a theology and ministry that emphasized personal piety and introspective experience.5 5 See the brief introduction to the “further reformation” in English in Arie de Reuver, tr. James A. De Jong, Sweet Communion: Trajectories of Spirituality from the Middle Ages through the Further Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 15-24. de Reuver notes that the very name of the movement in the Netherlands was the importation of a distinctively English, Puritan term: “Teellinck…the father of the Further Reformation introduced the Puritan term ‘further reformation’ from England to the Netherlands” (16). de Reuver indicates that the characteristic Puritan doctrine of assurance was central to the purpose and theology of the men of the “nadere reformatie”: “The Further Reformation developed a comprehensive pastoral psychology by which it intended to provide guidance on the manner in which the applied work of the Holy Spirit brought people to certainty of faith [that is, assurance of salvation—DJE]” (17). The significance of de Reuver’s work is his frank acknowledgment that the experientialism and spirituality of the further reformation were (and are!) derived from the medieval (Roman Catholic) mystics. Almost all reliable analysis of the “nadere reformatie” is found in the Dutch language. de Reuver gives the sources. Completely unreliable, indeed misleading, is Joel R. Beeke’s account of assurance in Calvin and the Reformed tradition. His book is ominously titled The Quest for (not: “Gift of”) Full Assurance: The Legacy of Calvin and His Successors (Banner of Truth, 1999). As the subtitle indicates, Beeke contends that the Puritan and “nadere reformatie” doctrine of assurance was a faithful development of the doctrine of Calvin, when, in fact, it was a radical departure from the Reformer’s and, indeed, the entire Reformation’s doctrine, as the Puritans themselves acknowledged. Playing on the ambiguity of the adjective, “full” (“full assurance”), Beeke assures his Reformed readers that the Puritan and

April 2009 9 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Puritanism’s erroneous doctrine of assurance is being spread throughout Great Britain, North America, and the world by influential organizations and theologians who promote Puritan and “further reformation” theology. The effects of this false doctrine of assurance are dreadful. Entire Reformed and Presbyterian congregations languish in doubt of their salvation and, therefore, persist in open disobedience to Christ’s command to His church and to all who believe on Him, that they partake of the Lord’s Supper (Matt. 26:26-29). It is reliably reported that in the Netherlands today (2008) is a Reformed congregation of more than one thousand members of which only five or ten old members regularly partake of the Lord’s Supper. The rest of the members, in

“nadere reformatie” doctrine of assurance can be harmonized with the teaching of the Heidelberg Catechism, that “true faith…is…a hearty trust which the Holy Ghost works in me by the Gospel, that not only to others, but to me also, forgiveness of sins, everlasting righteousness and salvation, are freely given by God,” etc. (Heid. Cat., Q&A 21, in Schaff, Creeds, vol. 3, 313; emphasis added). In fact, the Puritan and “nadere reformatie” doctrine flatly contradicts the Catechism. Regarding the fundamental issue, whether assurance is an aspect of the essence of faith (what faith is) or merely a possible “fruit” of faith (for a few favored saints after years of agonizing, laborious “quest” for assurance), Dr. Beeke hunts with the hounds and runs with the hares. Treating Calvin (and the Reformation), Beeke acknowledges that “it [faith] possesses assurance in its very nature. Assurance, certainty, trust—such is the essence of faith” (Quest, 38). Summing up, however, and expressing the Puritan and “nadere reformatie” thinking on assurance (which is his own thinking), Beeke tells us that “full assurance of personal salvation constitutes the well-being or fruit of faith rather than the essence of faith” (Quest, 276). Assurance now is a “goal, duty, and desire” (Quest, 275). The injurious thrust of The Quest for Full Assurance is a wholehearted defense and promotion of the Puritan and “nadere reformatie” doctrine of assurance (which robs many of the comfort of the gospel and drives them to doubt and despair) as though it were the teaching of Calvin, the Reformation, and the confessions (which emphatically it is not). Stoeffler affirms, and demonstrates, the influence of Puritanism on the “nadere reformatie”: “Reformed Pietism on the Continent was heavily indebted to the Puritans” (F. Ernest Stoeffler,The Rise of Evangelical Pietism, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965, 118).

10 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance the bondage of the Puritan doctrine of assurance, abstain, lacking assurance of salvation. All too believable is the rest of the report: The minister of the congregation recently issued a warning against too great liberty in the congregation in coming to the Lord’s Table.6 Presbyterian churches in Scotland suffer from the same dread malady. Many persons, publicly professing faith in Christ and living regular lives of obedience to the law in love for God, live all their life doubting whether they are loved by God and saved, and die in the terror of the real possibility of being damned. The Puritan doctrine of assurance was not that of the Reform- ers. This is freely admitted by Reformed theologians who defend the Puritan doctrine of assurance. The Presbyterian theologian Wil- liam Cunningham condemns the teaching of Calvin and all the other Reformers on assurance as “exaggerated and erroneous.”7 Calvin’s doctrine of assurance and its radical difference from that of the Puritans are expressed in his definition of faith:

Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.8

6 Ironically, it was a Puritan theologian who exposed the gross wickedness of the Reformed preachers who are responsible for keeping adult members of their congregation from the Lord’s Supper: “[Satan] discourages them [church members] from duty by suggesting to them their unworthiness…. By this temptation, the devil takes many off from coming to the Lord’s table. Oh, says he [through ministers devoted to the discouraging of the saints—DJE], this is a solemn ordinance, and requires much holiness: how darest thou so unworthily come? you will eat and drink unworthily. Thus, as Saul kept the people from eating honey, so the devil by this temptation, scares many from this ordinance, which is sweeter than honey and the honey-comb” (Thomas Watson, Body of Divinity, Grand Rapids: Baker, repr. 1979), 592. 7 William Cunningham, “The Reformers and the Doctrine of Assur- ance,” in The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation (London: The Banner of Truth, 1967), 118. 8 John Calvin, Institutes, tr. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill

April 2009 11 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

For Calvin, all the Reformers, and the Reformation of the church in the sixteenth century, faith is assurance of salvation, faith essentially is assurance: “Faith [is] a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us.” Assurance, therefore, is the gift of God by the Holy Spirit to everyone to whom God gives faith. The Spirit works assurance in everyone in whom He works faith, and He works assurance in and with the working of faith. Of vital importance in Calvin’s definition, in view of the separation of faith and assurance by the Puritans and the promoters of the “further reformation,” past and present, is Calvin’s deliberate identification of the sealing by the Spirit, which refers to the Spirit’s assuring the child of God of his salvation, as the giving of faith itself. The Holy Spirit seals the believer, not years after giving him faith, if at all in this life, as was the doctrine of the Puritans, but when He gives him faith. With the entire Reformation, Calvin taught that the fatherly love of God for all His children dear expresses itself by giving all of them, young and old, hoary-headed saints and new converts, the assurance of His love for them. Not only did Calvin and the entire Reformation affirm that the gospel of grace assures all believers of God’s love and their salvation, this assurance of God’s people was one of the main purposes of the

(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.2.7. Contrary to the foolish dodge of Puritanism, the “further reformation,” Cunningham, and others, that Calvin (and the entire Reformation) defined faith only as faith existed in Europe at the extraordinary time of the Reformation, this, namely, knowledgeable (full) assurance of one’s own personal salvation, is what faith is always and everywhere—at the time of the Reformation in Europe, in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in seventeenth century England and the Netherlands, and in twenty-first century Scotland and North America. Of Calvin’s definition of faith, Herman Bavinck judges that it is “correct as well as complete.” Indeed, “no more beautiful definition is conceivable than that faith is a firm and certain knowledge of the mercy that God has shown us in Christ. Essentially, what else is Christian faith but the assurance…that ‘the eternal Faith (sic; should be “Father”—DJE) of our Lord Jesus Christ…is our God and Father because of Christ His Son’” (Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, ed. John Bolt, tr. John Vriend, Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008, 128).

12 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

Reformation. The necessity of the Reformation was Rome’s holding the people in the bondage of doubt concerning their salvation. Cal- vin stated this in his great treatise, “The Necessity of Reforming the Church” (1544).

Lastly, there was another most pestilential error, which not only occupied the minds of men, but was regarded as one of the principal articles of faith, of which it was impious to doubt, viz., that believers ought to be perpetually in suspense and uncertainty as to their interest in the divine favor. By this suggestion of the devil, the power of faith was completely extinguished, the benefits of Christ’s purchase destroyed, and the salvation of men overthrown. For, as Paul declares, that faith only is Christian faith which inspires our hearts with confidence, and emboldens us to appear in the presence of God (Rom. 5:2). On no other view could his doctrine in another passage be maintained, viz., that “we have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Rom. 8:15).9

Those churches in which the majority of the members, often the large majority of members, professing faith, languish year after year in doubt of their salvation, under the influence of the theology of Puritanism and the “further reformation,” are not furthering the Reformation. They are not even continuing the Reformation. On the contrary, their gospel, which does not work assurance, but doubt, is a radical deviation from the gospel of the Reformation. In the vitally important matter of the experience of salvation, about which the disciples of the Puritans are always boasting, their miserable people do not differ from the doubting hordes of Rome. Those churches need the Reformation and its gospel of assurance. As for the testimony of the Reformed confessions concerning assurance, God’s gift of it to all His children, and the enjoyment of it by every believer, the Heidelberg Catechism is representative. Question and Answer 1 has every believer confess that he possesses and enjoys

9 John Calvin, “The Necessity of Reforming the Church, Presented to the Imperial Diet of Spires, A.D. 1544, in the Name of All Who Wish Christ to Reign,” in Calvin’s Tracts Relating to the Reformation, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), 136.

April 2009 13 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal the only comfort in life and death, knowing with certainty that he belongs to Jesus Christ, his faithful Savior. The believer concludes: “Wherefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life.”10 Question and Answer 53 make assurance the normal work of the Spirit in His saving of every elect child of God: “What dost thou believe concerning the Holy Ghost?...that he is also given unto me, makes me by a true faith partaker of Christ and all his benefits, comforts me, and shall abide with me forever.”11 In flat contradiction of Brooks, the Puritans, and the “further reformation,” that “it is one thing for me to have faith, and another thing for me to know that I have faith,”12 the Reformed confession teaches that the gift of true faith includes sure knowledge that one has faith; certainty that one is partaker of Christ and all His benefits; the comfort that one belongs to Christ; the confidence of preservation; and the hope of everlasting life. This is assurance! This is assurance of one’s own personal salvation, now and everlastingly!

Assurance, an Indispensable Work of the Spirit It is an important aspect of the gospel that God not only wills to save all His chosen people, but also wills that all of them be assured of their salvation. Contrary to the Puritan Thomas Brooks, it is one and the same mercy for God to love the soul and to assure the beloved soul of His love. To say it differently, the same mercy that loves His children moves God to cause them to know His love for them, and to know it with certainty. Willing our assurance, God gives us assurance. He gives this precious grace as a free gift. Assurance is not our own work, our own achievement by our own hard efforts. Neither is assurance bestowed in recognition of the superior spirituality by which a few children distinguish themselves from the rest of the congregation. God gives us assurance of salvation with the gift of salvation itself. Assurance of salvation is simply an aspect of salvation, and

10 Schaff, Creeds, vol. 3, 307, 308. 11 Schaff, Creeds, vol. 3, 324. 12 Brooks, 316.

14 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance not the least aspect. Assurance is the “experience” of salvation, just as certainty that I am physically alive is the experience of physical life, or certainty that I am the son of my parents is the experience of my sonship, or confidence that I am the husband of this woman is the experience of marriage. Assurance of salvation, therefore, is the expected, normal spiritual condition and state of mind and heart of every regenerated, believing child of God. Assurance is not unusual, extraordinary, or remarkable in the congregation of believers and their children. To be sure, assurance is wonderful and dear. That I should be assured of eternal life? That I should be able to cry, “Abba, Father,” as Romans 8:15 expresses our assurance? That I should be as certain that I belong to Christ as I am certain that I belong to my wife? This certainty is cause for daily amazement and gratitude. But this grace is not restricted to a few specially favored Christians, mostly old. In the church of God, where the sound doctrine of the gospel is purely preached and discipline is administered, there is not a small group of elite members, set apart from the rest of the congregation and exalted on the spiritual pedestal of sitting at the Lord’s Table, by virtue of their distinguishing themselves by obtaining assurance through their hard labors. It is normal that a believer have assurance. Every believer can have, may have, and ought to have assurance. When his spiritual condition is healthy, every believer does have assurance. It is possible that a believer lacks assurance for awhile, but this is the exception. Lack of assurance by a believer is an abnormality, a spiritual disease—a culpable disease—for which there is a remedy. God gives assurance as the peculiar work of the Spirit of Christ. The Father elected; the Son redeemed; the Spirit assures. To assure us sinners, the other Comforter is necessary (John 14:16).

Biblical Doctrine: Sealing We learn the truth about assurance especially from three passages, or kinds of passages, of Scripture. The first is those texts that teach the sealing work of the Spirit. Several texts teach that the Spirit seals the believer, including II Corinthians 1:21, 22; Ephesians 1:13, 14; and

April 2009 15 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Ephesians 4:30. Ephesians 1:13, 14 is the most complete teaching, as it is the most important in the controversy over assurance.

In whom [Christ] ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory.

The passage teaches that those who believe in Christ, according to God’s eternal predestination, are sealed. Sealing is a work of grace within those who trust in Christ that makes them sure and certain. The question is, in what sense? Are they sealed objectively, as though God does something in them that guarantees that they will persevere in faith and holiness unto everlasting life? Or, are they sealed subjectively, as though God works in them a conscious certainty that they are saved and shall forever be saved, that is, as though God gives them personal assurance of salvation? The latter is the meaning: sealing is God’s work of assuring those who trust in Christ; sealing is a work of God in their consciousness. That this is the meaning of the sealing is evident from the fact that sealing in the text follows hearing the word and believing in Christ, which are conscious spiritual activities. Besides, Scripture knows of no special work of God following our believing that uniquely establishes that we will persevere in faith and holiness unto eternal life. Our salvation is objectively sure in God’s eternal purpose of election: “The foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his” (II Tim. 2:19). With regard to the permanency of the work of grace in us, this is certain already in regeneration, which precedes our hearing the word and believing. If God begins the work of salvation in one, He will finish and perfect it. There simply is no need or place for a work of grace following our believing that guarantees that God will not abandon the work of salvation He has begun. What follows hearing and believing is assurance of salvation in the soul of the one who hears and believes.

16 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

Not only is the Spirit the one who accomplishes the sealing, but He Himself is the seal in one who hears and believes. The Authorized Version’s translation of Ephesians 1:13 correctly gives the sense of the text: “with that holy Spirit of promise.” That the Spirit Himself is the seal is indicated by the related statement that immediately follows: “which [the Holy Spirit] is the earnest of our inheritance” (v. 14). This is confirmed by Ephesians 4:30, the literal translation of which text is, ‘in whom [the Holy Spirit of God] ye were sealed.’ The sphere in which the sealing took place was the Holy Spirit Himself.13 The Spirit Himself in the one who hears the word of God and believes in Christ is the assurance of salvation to the believer, just as the presence of the loving mother holding her child in her arms is the assurance to the child that she is the beloved child of that mother. How mistaken, how impossible, the doctrine that the Spirit dwells in many, if not most, of the children of God, while they go on, year after year, lacking the sealing, that is, assurance of salvation! As though it is possible, indeed normal, that people have the Comforter, but no comfort!

Sealed, When and How? When and how the believer is sealed with the Spirit is the question. Many of the Puritans and certain of their contemporary disciples, agreeing that sealing is the assuring of the sealed of their salvation, contend that the sealing is a work of the Spirit that follows faith in Christ in time, often after many years. Therefore, it is common, if not the norm, they insist, that believers lack assurance of salvation. With reference to sealing, or witnessing, as the Spirit’s work of assuring the believer of his salvation, Thomas Brooks wrote:

Though the Spirit be a witnessing [that is, sealing] Spirit, yet he doth not always witness [that is, seal] to believers their adoption, their interest in Christ, etc. There is a mighty difference between the work-

13 The Authorized Version translates Ephesians 4:30, “whereby ye are sealed,” expressing that the Spirit is the divine means of sealing, which is true, but not the precise thought of the text. The original Greek is “en hoo.”

April 2009 17 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

ing of the Spirit, and the witness of the Spirit. There are oftentimes many glorious and efficacious works of the Spirit, as faith, love, repentance, holiness, etc., where there is not the witness of the Spirit (Isaiah 1:10)…. Though the Spirit of the Lord be a witnessing and a sealing Spirit, yet he doth not always witness and seal up the love and favor of the Father to believers’ souls….14

Thomas Goodwin, whom J. I. Packer praises highly as the best of the Puritan exegetes of Paul and whose doctrine of assurance, according to Packer, “represent[s] the main current of Puritan thinking,”15 is clear and emphatic that the sealing with the Spirit taught in Ephesians 1:13, 14 is a work of the Spirit distinct from faith and a work following the gift of faith in time. The necessary implication of Goodwin’s doctrine of sealing is that it is reserved only for a very few believers. “The work of faith is a distinct thing, a different thing, from the work of assurance.”16 Basic to Goodwin’s insistence on this difference between faith and assurance, or the sealing with the Spirit, is Good- win’s denial that faith in Jesus Christ is assurance of salvation. Faith in Christ is merely a confidence that the promises of the gospel are true. It is not a confidence that the promises of the gospel are true for oneself. Faith in Jesus Christ, faith in Jesus Christ from the heart, leaves the believer doubting whether he himself is the beloved object of the promises of the gospel. “It must be granted, that in all faith there is an assurance; but of what? Of the truth of the promise…. But the question here [that is, concerning being sealed with the Spirit] is about the assurance of a man’s interest; that is not always in faith.”17 The sealing with the Spirit follows the Spirit’s work of giving faith to the elect child of God in time. Goodwin suggests that this is usually a long time, for the believer must wait and work for the sealing that gives assurance:

14 Brooks, 520. The emphasis is Brooks’. 15 Packer, 179, 180. 16 Thomas Goodwin, “An Exposition of the First Chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians,” in Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1861), 235; the emphasis is Goodwin’s. 17 Goodwin, Works, 235.

18 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

You that believe are to wait for this promise [of being sealed]…. Serve your God day and night faithfully, walk humbly; there is a promise of the Holy Ghost to come and fill your hearts with joy unspeakable and glorious, to seal you up to the day of redemption. Sue this promise out, wait for it, rest not in believing only, rest not in assurance by graces only; there is a further assurance to be had.18

The line, “Rest not in believing only,” incredible in one who claimed to be furthering the Reformation, is fatal to the Puritan doctrine of assurance, and damning. Although Goodwin does not expressly say so, he puts assurance— personal assurance that one (a believer in Jesus Christ!) is saved— forever out of the reach of most believing children of God. For the sealing with the Spirit, which gives assurance, is an immediate, extraordinary, mystical experience:

There is an immediate assurance of the Holy Ghost [the sealing with the Spirit], by a heavenly and divine light, of a divine authority, which the Holy Ghost sheddeth in a man’s heart, (not having relation to grace wrought, or anything in a man’s self,) whereby he sealeth him up to the day redemption.... One way [of assurance] is discoursive; a man gathereth that God loveth him from the effects…. But the other [the sealing with the Spirit] is intuitive, as the angels are said to know things…. There is light that cometh and overpowereth a man’s soul, and assureth him that God is his, and he is God’s, and that God loveth him from everlasting.19

18 Goodwin, Works, 248. In his book The Object and Acts of Justifying Faith Goodwin acknowledges that many who finally obtain assurance do so only after many years. To the statement “that though assurance may be vouchsafed to some of lower rank than apostles, yet it is to such as are of long standing Christianity, who after long experience have hope and assurance begotten in them,” Goodwin responds, “I grant it, that many not till then have had it” (Thomas Goodwin, The Object and Acts of Justifying Faith, Marshallton, Del.: National Foundation for Christian Education, n.d., 357). 19 Goodwin, Works, 233. The Puritan Richard Sibbes’ doctrine of sealing is the same as that of Brooks and Goodwin. “Sealing is not the work of faith, but it is a work of the Spirit upon faith, assuring the soul of its estate in grace.” Sealing is an experience of “spiritual ravishings,” “the extraor-

April 2009 19 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

This is the unbiblical, “sickly” mysticism of the Puritan doctrine of assurance. This mysticism is fundamental to the Puritan doctrine. The dependency for assurance upon strange experiences by the people in churches committed to the Puritan doctrine of assurance is not an unfortunate aberration. It is the inevitable, necessary effect and fruit of the Puritan doctrine. The result is twofold. First, assurance, or the sealing with the Spirit, is forever beyond the reach of most of the people. They never experience the “light that cometh and overpowereth a man’s soul.” They live and die in the dreadful misery of doubt—doubt that God loves them, doubt that Christ died for them, doubt that their sins are forgiven, doubt that they will go to heaven. The Puritan divines, past and present, will answer to God for the souls of these people. The second result is that those elite few who suppose they have received the light that overpowers a man’s soul and therefore are certain that they are saved lean on a broken reed. Their state is worse than that of those who, true to the Puritan doctrine, honestly doubt. For they deliberately “rest not in believing only.” God does not assure His children of His love by immediate, mystical experiences. He assures His children by “believing only.” With an honesty that shames those who like to leave the impression that the Puritan doctrine of assurance is faithful to Calvin, Goodwin frankly admits that his, and the Puritan’s, doctrine of assurance dif- fers radically from that of Calvin. “Calvin,” says Goodwin correctly, taught that the sealing with the Spirit is “the work of faith itself…. In believing, in the work of faith, the Holy Ghost did seal up the truth of the promise unto their hearts.” That is, Calvin taught that when a man believes the gospel the Spirit seals him in such a way that “there is an assurance of a man’s interest in those promises [of the gospel].” Goodwin rejects this doctrine of assurance. Calvin’s teaching is “what dinary feeling of the Spirit,” “superadded” to justification by faith and to sanctification. Many of God’s believing children lack assurance, not having been sealed with the Spirit. Therefore, Sibbes exhorts them to “labor…for this seal, to have our souls stamped with the Spirit of God” (Richard Sibbes, Works of Richard Sibbes, vol. 3, An Exposition of 2nd Corinthians Chapter One, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, repr. 1981, 442-484).

20 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance it [the doctrine of assurance] is not.”20 The influential English preacher D. M. Lloyd-Jones promotes the Puritan doctrine of sealing and thus the Puritan doctrine of assurance. Lloyd-Jones rightly understands the sealing with the Spirit in Ephesians 1:13, 14 as a work of the Spirit that “authenticates to us the fact that we are the sons of God, truly His people, and heirs, joint-heirs with Christ, of a glorious inheritance,” that is, the work of the Spirit assuring the believer of his salvation.21 But he makes a “sharp distinction between believing (the act of faith) and the sealing of the Spirit…. Sealing with the Spirit does not always happen immediately when a man believes…. There may be a great interval…it is possible for a person to be a believer and…still not know the sealing of the Spirit.”22 “ ‘Sealing with the Spirit’ is something subsequent to believing, something additional to believing.”23 This something “is an experience; it is something experimental,” indeed, “the highest, the greatest experience which a Christian can have in this world…an overwhelming experience.”24 According to Lloyd-

20 Goodwin, Works, 228. With this candid, and accurate, admission by a leading Puritan of the radical difference between Calvin’s and the Pu- ritans’ doctrines of assurance, compare Joel R. Beeke’s assessment: “The Dutch divines [of the “nadere reformatie”]…did not misread Calvin and the Reformers [on assurance of salvation] but simply applied the teaching of the early Reformers to their own day” (Quest, 308). Hear Calvin himself: “There are two operations of the Spirit in faith, corresponding to the two parts of which faith consists, as it enlightens, and as it establishes the mind. The commencement of faith is knowledge: the completion of it is a firm and steady conviction, which admits of no opposing doubt…. No wonder, then, if Paul should declare that the Ephesians, who received by faith the truth of the gospel, were confirmed in that faith by the seal of the Holy Spirit” (John Calvin, comment on Ephesians 1:13, particularly the sealing with the Spirit, in his Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957, 208). 21 D. M. Lloyd-Jones, God’s Ultimate Purpose: An Expostion of Ephe- sians 1:1 to 23 (Grand Rapids: Baker, repr. 1979), 266. 22 Lloyd-Jones, 249. 23 Lloyd-Jones, 250. 24 Lloyd-Jones, 267, 270, 275.

April 2009 21 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Jones, this “experience” is the most desirable feeling that a Christian can have, short of heaven. The truth of sealing in Ephesians 1:13, 14, in Lloyd-Jones’ judgment, is “one of the most vital statements for us as Christian people at the present time.” The failure to understand sealing (as Lloyd-Jones explains it) has been the “chief trouble [with the Christian Church] for a number of years.”25 Since the experience is the Spirit’s assurance of the believer that he is saved, it is extremely precious. But Lloyd-Jones does not tell us what this experience consists of. He admits that he cannot. The best he can do is describe the experience in the words of Goodwin, Wesley, Flavel, Edwards, Moody, Evans, and Whitefield: overpowering light; overwhelming experience; ravishing tastes of heavenly joys; “ecstasy”; an extraordinary view of the glory of Christ; a flood of tears and weeping aloud; such an experience of God’s love as caused Moody to ask God “to stay His hand”26; relief of mind; rejoicing in God.27 Because the all-important sealing follows faith in time, Lloyd- Jones too sets all believers seeking for sealing, that is, assurance of salvation consisting of an indescribable experience: “Are we to seek this sealing? My answer, without any hesitation, is that we should most certainly do so.”28 The people must seek the sealing by working, and working hard: “Prepare the way…mortify…cleanse [yourselves]… put into practice the virtues…labor at it…pray for this blessing…be desperate for it.”29 Alas, however, “many Christian people have only known this just before their death.”30 Thus, like a good Puritan (but a

25 Lloyd-Jones, 255. 26 It is ominous for Lloyd-Jones’ sealing that God gives it to Pelagians such as D. L. Moody. If the Spirit of truth had anything at all to give to a Pelagian like D. L. Moody by direct revelation, it would have been this warning, “Moody, repent of your sin of teaching the false gospel of salvation by the will of man, which false gospel makes assurance of salvation utterly impossible.” 27 Lloyd-Jones, 274-278, 286. 28 Lloyd-Jones, 294. 29 Lloyd-Jones, 294-300. 30 Lloyd-Jones, 299.

22 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance very bad pastor and theologian), Lloyd-Jones shuts up many Christians to an entire lifetime of doubt whether they are saved. And since the sealing is an undefined and indescribable “experience,” Lloyd-Jones sends all believers out on an uncertain, perilous quest—the quest for the will-o’-the-wisp of a feeling that they are loved by God.31 The translation of Ephesians 1:13 in the Authorized Version might lend credence to the erroneous and injurious doctrine that the sealing of the Spirit and, therefore, assurance of salvation follow the gift of faith in time, often after many years of working for assurance. The Authorized Version unfortunately inserts into the text the word “after”: “in whom after that ye believed, ye were sealed.” In the original Greek is neither the word nor the notion, “after.” Literally, the text reads this way: ‘in whom [Christ] ye also, having heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation—in whom [Christ] also having believed, ye were sealed,’ etc. The thought of the text is this: In the past (and for the Ephesian believers the not too distant past32) the elect saints at Ephesus heard

31 The pathetic spiritual and emotional “desperation” of disciples of Lloyd-Jones and the Puritans to get the “overwhelming experience” that will signify their assurance of salvation, which they “desperately” lack, especially on their deathbed, is the direct result of Lloyd-Jones’ teaching: “Be desperate for it.” Lloyd-Jones will answer for this “desperation.” Desperation is a “loss of hope and surrender to despair,” or “a state of hopelessness leading to rashness.” 32 I mention this in order to call attention to the fact that within a few years of the conversion of the Ephesians the apostle could say to them, that all who believed the gospel had been sealed with the Holy Spirit. Altogether apart from the fact that the sealing was contemporaneous with the hearing and believing, the apostle, writing a very short time after the Ephesians’ hearing and believing the gospel, was confident, indeed affirmed, that all the believers had been sealed, that is, received the assurance of their salvation. He did not labor under the misapprehension that for many of the Ephesian believers many years must pass before they obtained sealing. Had a Puritan written the Ephesian church he would have said, “In whom ye also, having heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation, in whom, having believed, you should now strive and work for many years to be sealed with the Holy Spirit, and here are the fifteen steps of striving by which perhaps

April 2009 23 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal the word of the truth, believed in Christ, and were sealed. These three things happened in this order, but all at the same time. The doctrine of the text is that when one believes in Christ, having heard the gospel, he is sealed with the Holy Spirit at this time and under these circumstances. Sealing, that is, the assurance of salvation, accompanies believing in Christ, as an integral element of the believing. Sealing follows believing in the order of the text as the effect of believing, just as believing is the effect of the hearing of the gospel, but as the effect that is simultaneous with the believing.33 What the apostle adds in Ephesians 1:14 about the “earnest” is related. An “earnest” is both the foretaste of something and the guarantee of the future, complete possession of that thing. An example of an earnest from earthly life might be the down-payment one receives on a certain property. The down-payment is both the first part of the full payment and the guarantee that the full payment will be made. A better example, doing justice both to the notion of foretaste and to the spiritual reality, might be the kiss of a woman who engages to become a man’s wife. The kiss is both the foretaste of the coming delights of marriage and the woman’s guarantee that she will marry the man. In Ephesians 1:14, the earnest is foretaste and pledge of the in- you may obtain the sealing before you die. But then again you may not.” 33 “The relation between [‘having believed,’ in Eph. 1:13] and [‘ye were sealed’] is not to be conceived as following in temporal order. There may be a logical order here; but as far as time is concerned, the [‘having believed’] and the [‘ye were sealed’] must undoubtedly be conceived as contemporaneous.... As soon as they believed in Christ, it stands to reason that they also have the Holy Spirit; and as soon as they have the Holy Spirit, they are sealed” (Herman Hoeksema, unpublished exegesis of Ephesians 1 and 2, privately bound by the Protestant Reformed Seminary, Grandville, Michigan as “Chapel Talks on Ephesians 1 and 2,” 28). Also Herman Bavinck taught that the sealing work of the Spirit mentioned in Ephesians 1:13 occurs at the “moment” of believing: “When those who are preordained by God are called in time…then at that very moment they obtain faith and by that faith they receive justification and the adoption as children (Rom. 3:22, 24; 4:5; 5:1; Gal. 3:26; 4:5; etc.), with the assurance of sonship by the witness of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:15-16; Gal. 4:6; 2 Cor. 1:22; Eph. 1:13; 4:30)” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, 50; emphasis added).

24 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance heritance of all those who believe in Christ. It is perfect salvation, body and soul, in the new world. As foretaste and pledge, the earnest is assurance of salvation. The earnest is the Spirit Himself. And we have the Spirit as earnest in our consciousness, that is, we have assurance (such is the relation of v. 14 to v. 13), when we believe in Christ, not years or even months later. We have the Spirit as earnest by believing in Christ, not some other way, for example, by working, striving, laboring, weeping, and what not more spiritual acts.

Witnessing with Our Spirit The second passage that teaches the truth about assurance is the most profound text on assurance in all of Scripture, Romans 8:15, 16: “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.” The entire eighth chapter of Romans is one glorious confession of, and exultation in, assurance. It is put in the mouth of every believing child of God. Romans 8 utterly demolishes the Puritan notion that many believers, probably most believers, live for years in doubt of their salvation and that this is the will of God for many of His dear children. Written to Roman believers and their children, only recently converted from heathendom, the eighth chapter of Romans teaches the truth that all believers, not only have salvation, but also have the assurance of salvation. We all groan, not in doubt of our salvation, but in ardent longing for the resurrection of our body (v. 23). This is assurance. We all know that all things are working together for our good (v. 28). This is assurance. We all are certain that God is for us and that nothing can be against us (v. 31). This is assurance. We all are sure that God delivered His Son up for us (v. 32). “Us” includes me. This is assurance. In that marvelous exclamation of assurance consisting of verses 35-39, every believer declares his or her certainty, not only that he or she is loved by Christ and God, but also, and especially, that nothing

April 2009 25 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal can separate him or her from the love of God. Indeed, every believer exclaims that in all the troubles of life, which are many and severe, he or she is “more than conquerors.” This is assurance. The entire wretched Puritan doctrine of assurance is smashed to pieces on Romans 8:35-39. Would to God the contemporary disciples of the Puritans would demolish this doctrine, forthrightly, clearly, unambiguously, and boldly, in their preaching, teaching, and writing, thus delivering thousands of doubting, despairing members of their churches from their bondage, in the mercy of God! The sinful doubt of everyone who believes the gospel of grace from the heart must, and will, be destroyed by the sound preaching of Romans 8. Romans 8:15, 16 is the profound explanation of the assurance of the elect believer. Verse 15 affirms the assurance of the believer: He cries, “Abba, Father.” “Abba” is the Hebrew, or Aramaic, word meaning “father.” “Father,” in the passage, translates the Greek word for father. “Abba, Father” expresses certainty of salvation. One who knows God as his father is sure of the love of God for him in Jesus Christ. Of course, one who calls God his father is sure of his own sonship by the adoption of the cross. “Abba, Father” is expressive of universal certainty. All believers, whether Jew or Gentile, know God as their father. Besides, Romans 8 attributes this calling upon God as father, not merely to a few super- saints like the apostle himself (although he would never distinguish himself from the rest of the church as a super-saint), but to all who believe the gospel of grace from the heart: “We cry.” “Abba, Father” is a strong affirmation of certainty. The believer is doubly sure that God is his father: “Father, Father.” The believer exclaims God’s fatherhood of him, and, therefore, also his own sonship, loudly, as one does when he is sure of something: “We cry.” One thing explains this assurance of believers. Rather, one person, one person within them, explains this assurance. The explanation of the believers’ assurance is that “ye have received the Spirit of adoption.” By Him, we cry, “Abba, Father,” for this Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.

26 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

Verse 16 is not teaching that the Spirit’s witness is to our spirit, as though there is one witness—the witness of the believer’s spirit as prompted by the Holy Spirit. Rather, within the believer there are two distinct witnesses, testifying to the believer that he is a son, or she, a daughter, of God. One witness to the believer is his own human spirit. As the believer hears the gospel of God’s grace in Christ and believes on Christ as presented by that gospel, his own spirit witnesses powerfully to him that he is a child of God, adopted by God’s grace in the cross of God’s own eternal Son in human flesh. This witness by his own spirit is worked by the Holy Spirit. But this witness, powerful as it is, and prompted by the Holy Spirit, is not enough for assurance. One’s own spirit may be doubted. It is, after all, a very human spirit. Assurance of salvation on the part of a sinful, weak human does not come easy. Because of the importance of assurance, it may not rest on flimsy or assailable grounds. There must be two witnesses, and one of them must be God Him- self. “With” the witness of the spirit of the believer is another witness, testifying the same thing. The second witness to the sonship of the believer is the Spirit. Not only does the Spirit move the spirit of the believer to witness to the believer. He Himself also, within the believer, speaks to the believer, in a wonderful, mysterious (though not immediate), and convincing way, “You are a child of God.” This is the end of doubt. In the mouth of two witnesses, the word of the gospel of sonship is established in the soul of the believer. This is assurance of salvation. God the Spirit has spoken in the consciousness of the adopted child. The living word of God banishes doubt. The witness of God Himself is conclusive.

Justified by Faith The third group of passages establishing the truth of assurance is all those texts that teach justification by faith. One’s first reaction to this assertion might be that appeal to the biblical teaching of justification by faith has nothing to do with assurance of salvation. But this reaction would be mistaken. Justification implies the assurance of salvation on the part of the one who is justified by his faith. Inas-

April 2009 27 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal much as justification is the certain fruit and benefit of the activity of believing in Jesus Christ, assurance is of the essence of faith. Justification by faith is the forgiveness of the believing sinner’s sins by means of the sinner’s trusting in Jesus Christ with the faith worked in him by the Holy Spirit. Justification is the forgiveness of sins in the sinner’s consciousness, as the Reformation expressed with the phrase, “in the forum of the consciousness.” In the act of justification, God the judge declares in the consciousness of the sinner, “I cancel the debt of the guilt of your sins! I reckon to your account the obedience of My Son Jesus Christ!” In this verdict, God announces the judicial ground: “My Son, your redeemer, obeyed in your stead His lifelong and died as your substitute on the cross.” There is no forgiveness except on the basis of the obedience of Christ in the forgiven sinner’s stead. The Belgic Confession defines justification as “the remission of our sinsfor Jesus Christ’s sake.”34 Every believer seeks justification on the basis of the death of Christ, as the Heidelberg Catechism teaches in its explanation of the fifth petition of the model prayer, “Forgive us our debts”: “Be pleased, for the sake of Christ’s blood, not to impute to us, miserable sinners, our manifold transgressions, nor the evil which still always cleaves to us.”35 The verdict of justification, in the sinner’s consciousness, therefore, includes, as part of the verdict, indeed, as the very foundation of the verdict, that Christ died for the sinner whose sins are pardoned. This means that in the verdict of justification itself is the assurance that God loves the sinner whose sins he forgives, the assurance of such love as gave God’s only begotten Son for this sinner. Still more, because all Scripture proclaims that Christ, His cross, and the blessing of forgiveness flow from God’s eternal love for certain sinners in the decree of election, the verdict of justification assures the sinner whose sins are forgiven that God has loved him with an eternal love. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified

34 Belgic Confession, Art. 23, in Schaff, Creeds, vol. 3, 409. 35 Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 126, in Schaaf, 353, 354.

28 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him” (Rom. 5:8, 9). Assurance of the love of God for the justified sinner, on the part of every justified sinner, is the meaning of Romans 5:1: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God.” Having peace with God is assurance, that is, conscious certainty, that the sinner is reconciled to God, because God has redeemed him in love for him. In the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, Jesus teaches that the publican “went down to his house justified” (Luke 18:14). The meaning is that the publican returned home leaping and dancing, with gladness on his face and peace and joy in his soul, conscious and assured that God pardoned his sins in mercy for the sake of the sacrifice of the Lamb on his behalf. This was assurance of salvation. This was assurance of the love of God for him. This was assurance of salvation and the love of God as an essential element of justification by faith. It is no more possible for a sinner to be justified by faith without assurance of justification, salvation, and the love of God than it would be possible for a condemned criminal to depart the courtroom in which he had just heard a favorably disposed judge acquit him without knowing that he was acquitted and that the judge was gracious. Since every true believer is justified and since assurance of forgiveness, salvation, and the love of God is an essential aspect of justification by faith, denial that assurance of salvation belongs to justifying faith is, in fact, the denial of justification by faith — the heart of the gospel of grace. Nevertheless, the Puritans deny that assurance of salvation is an element of justification by faith. They deny this simply by denying, as they do, that assurance, or certainty of one’s own salvation, is of the essence of (justifying) faith. They deny this by denying, as they also do, that the Spirit gives assurance in and with the gift of (justifying) faith. They also deny that assurance is part of justifying faith, explicitly.

The first conclusion we will begin with and premise as a foundation to what follows, is, that that act of faith which justifies a sinner, is distinct from knowing he hath eternal life, and may therefore be without

April 2009 29 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

it, because it doth not necessarily contain prevailing assurance in it. By prevailing assurance, I mean such an assurance as overpowereth doubts and sense to the contrary, so as, in the believer’s knowledge, he is able to say, Christ is mine, and my sins are forgiven; such an assurance whereby a man is a conqueror, as Paul speaks, Rom. 8:37, when he expresseth such strong assurance.36

According to Goodwin and the Puritans, the justified sinner is not able to know that his sins are forgiven, or to say that Christ is his. In asserting that justification by faith leaves the justified sinner unable to say, “My sins are forgiven,” the Puritans press their determination to deny assurance to believers to the point of absurdity. Justifi- cation by faith is God’s declaration to the sinner, in his consciousness, “Your sins are forgiven.” To acknowledge justification by faith (“that act of faith which justifies a sinner”), but deny that the justified sinner knows he is justified is not only false doctrine. It is absurd. One thing is sure: This doctrine is no “furthering” of the Refor- mation. On the contrary, it is, in fact, a denial of justification by faith as much as is the heresy of Rome, and leaves the penitent sinner in exactly the same miserable condition: Doubt! That the Puritan and “further reformation” doctrine of justification is the same as Rome’s in leaving believers in doubt of their forgiveness and salvation and that the Puritan and “further reformation” doctrine is diametrically opposed to Calvin’s (and the entire Reformation’s) teaching are proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, by Calvin’s refutation of the decisions of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent regarding justification. Trent “inveigh[ed] against what they call The Vain Confidence of Heretics. This consists, according to their definition, in our holding it as certain that our sins are forgiven, and resting in this certainty.”37 Trent condemned the certainty of forgiveness, that is, justification, as the vain confidence of heretics. Puritanism and the “further

36 Goodwin, Object and Acts, 338. 37 John Calvin, “Acts of the Council of Trent with Antidote,” in Calvin’s Tracts, tr. Henry Beveridge, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1851), 125. Calvin wrote this “Antidote” in 1547.

30 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance reformation” do the same. Indeed, their error is worse. Puritan- ism and the “further reformation” condemn as vain confidence the certainty of forgiveness of elect believers who are believing the gospel. With appeal to Psalm 32, Romans 5:1-5, Ephesians 3:12, Romans 8:37, and James 1:6, Calvin declares that certainty, indeed a bold certainty, of forgiveness is the gift of God to all believers and that it is the gift of God with forgiveness, as an element of the forgiveness itself. Charging the Roman Catholic theologians with “rob[bing] all consciences of calm placid confidence” by their “leaving it in suspense to whom and when they are forgiven,” Calvin asks, rhetorically,

Where, then, is that boldness of which Paul elsewhere speaks (Eph. 3:12), that access with confidence to the Father through faith in Christ? Not contented with the term confidence, he furnishes us with boldness, which is certainly something more than certainty.38

He exposes a fundamental error of Rome, as of Puritanism and the “further reformation,” concerning faith when he adds, “faith is destroyed as soon as certainty is taken away.”39 Rome, Puritanism, and the “further reformation” contend that Paul’s claims of assurance of salvation apply only to himself and a few other specially favored saints and that they had their assurance by “special revelation,” or a mystical experience. Calvin denies this contention as a “frivolous quibble”: “[Paul] claims nothing so special for himself as not to share it with all believers, when in their name as much as his own, he boldly exults over death and life, the present and the future [in Romans 8:35-39].”40 At Trent, Rome declared: “Neither is it to be asserted that it becomes those who are truly justified to determine with themselves, without any kind of doubt, that they are truly justified.”41 Puritanism agrees, as the quotation of Thomas Goodwin above indicates. Calvin

38 Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, 125. 39 Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, 125. 40 Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, 137. 41 Quoted in Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, 97.

April 2009 31 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal responds: “Paul makes it [full assurance] the perpetual attendant of faith.”42 Calvin recognizes Rome’s “ingenious” ploy of seeming to do justice to the Bible’s teaching of faith’s certainty, all the while maintaining its false doctrine that individual believers are in doubt of their own forgiveness and salvation. “They think…that they ingeniously obviate all objections when they recommend a general persuasion of the grace of Christ…[while] they allow none to apply grace to themselves with the firm assurance of faith.”43 Puritanism and the “further reformation” employ the same subterfuge when they maintain that believers are certain that Christ forgives sins, but uncertain whether Christ forgives their sins. Calvin scoffs at this worthless certainty. Those who teach it put both certainty and the efficacy of the death of Christ “in the air, so as to be only in confused imagination.” Calvin continues: “Christ is not set before me and others, merely that we may believe him to have been the Redeemer of Abraham, but that every one may appropriate the salvation which he procured.”44 The gravity of the false doctrine concerning assurance of salvation is indicated by Calvin’s blunt statement, “Paul and John recognize none as the children of God but those who know it.”45 One may say that Calvin was wrong about faith, justification, and certainty of forgiveness and eternal life. He may not say that Puritan- ism and the “further reformation” are faithful to Calvin (and the entire Reformation) on these great issues. And if he says that Calvin was wrong, and that Puritanism and the “further reformation” are right, he aligns himself with Rome on some of the most fundamental issues of the sixteenth century Reformation of the church.

The Assurer The three outstanding passages on assurance—the sealing pas-

42 Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, 126. 43 Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, 127. 44 Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, 127. 45 Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, 127.

32 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance sages, Romans 8:15, 16, and the passages teaching justification by faith alone—all reveal that it is the Holy Spirit who performs the indispensable work of assurance. Only the Spirit can assure the elect sinner that he is forgiven, saved, and a child of God. The Spirit is God, and only God can and may assure anyone of salvation. Only God knows who are His. Only God’s testimony is conclusive for the elect sinner. Mere human testimony can, and will, be doubted. It is the same with personal assurance of salvation as it is with the church’s assurance that the Bible is the word of God: assurance is due to, and rests upon, the witness of God the Holy Spirit. “The Spirit itself beareth witness… that we are the children of God” (Rom. 8:16). The Spirit is the one who assures of salvation as the Spirit of Christ. Assurance of salvation is possible only in Christ Jesus. Ephesians 1:13 teaches that the believer is sealed in Christ with the Spirit: ‘In whom [Christ], also having believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise.’ There is no assurance for the sinner apart from Christ. Working on behalf of Christ and in union with Christ, the Spirit assures as the Spirit of Christ. But He is the Spirit of Christ in the elect sinner. Only one who is in us, in our inmost being, can remove our deeply seated doubt, assure us in the depths of our being, and comfort us from within our selves. No man can reach us where we must hear and be convinced that our sins are forgiven, that Christ died for us, even for us, and that we have God as our Father. But even Jesus Christ Himself outside of ourselves, alongside us, on the pulpit before us or on the couch next to us, cannot assure us. Therefore, He comes to us in the other Com- forter, the Breath of God, who penetrates our inmost being, speaking convincingly to our spirit and to us ourselves with our spirit that our sins are forgiven and that we are the children of God. It is the Spirit, within us, by whom “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts” by the word of justification, that is, the assurance that God loves us (Rom. 5:5). It is the Spirit, within us, who, by means of the declaration that our sins are forgiven, moves us to cry, “Abba, Father.” How does the Spirit assure the believing child of God?

April 2009 33 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

By the Gospel of Grace The Spirit does not give assurance after the manner of mysticism. He does not assure by special revelations, visions, extraordinary happenings, emotional experience, or direct whisperings in the soul, that is, whisperings apart from the preaching, reading, and meditating on the word of God and the use of the sacraments. The sealing with the Spirit is not an extraordinary, emotional, mystical experience. The witness of the Spirit with the spirit of the believer is not an immediate whispering, that is, a voice of the Spirit alongside and apart from the word of the gospel. The Spirit does not cry, “Abba, Father,” in a believer apart from the proclamation of the biblical gospel of justification by faith. The Spirit’s work of assurance is not after, in addition to, and far above His work of justifying faith in Jesus Christ. Thus is exposed and condemned the grievous error that is fundamental to the Puritan doctrine of assurance. The Spirit does not assure by Goodwin’s overpowering light; Sibbes’ “spiritual ravishings” and “extraordinary feeling of the Spirit,” “superadded” to justification by faith; or Lloyd-Jones’ undefined, but suggestive, “greatest experience.” The “mystical syllogism” of the leading Puritan theologians Brooks, Goodwin, and Sibbes, who, according to J. I. Packer “represent the main current of Puritan thinking,”46 must be rejected, root and branch, as heretical mysticism and spiritual rubbish. The “mystical syllogism” is an argument for assurance. For “the main current” of Puritanism it is the decisive argument for assurance. It is the subjective argument of the believer himself who ardently desires assurance of forgiveness and salvation, but, under the influence of his Puritan teachers, lacks assurance. The argument goes like this.

Major premise: Assurance of salvation consists of a special, extraordinary spiritual experience, a highly charged, mystical feeling. Minor premise: I have had such an extraordinary (and rare) experience (by the Spirit).

46 Packer, 179, 180.

34 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

Conclusion: Therefore, I am assured of salvation.

The argument is false in its entirety. The major premise is false: assurance of salvation consists of faith in Jesus Christ, which every believer has. The minor premise is false: the only experience worked by the Spirit in all of God’s children is the “ordinary” experience of peace and joy through believing in Jesus Christ. The conclusion is false: assurance of salvation is solidly based only on the promise of the gospel embraced by a true faith and thus bound by the Spirit upon the believing heart and consciousness. As false as the premises and conclusion is the whole syllogistic enterprise: The sinner is looking mainly, if not exclusively, within himself for assurance of salvation, rather than away from his sinful, uncertain self, with its fickle feelings, to Jesus Christ “out there” in the promise of the gospel. Mysticism’s way to assurance is illusory, deceiving, and perilous. Those who desperately seek and work for assurance along the way of mysticism either doom themselves to a life of doubt (because they never can obtain the “overpowering light” or achieve the “greatest experience”), or, if they do finally find the feeling they think they are seeking, consign themselves to perpetual questioning, whether the feeling was genuine (so much depends on the feeling, after all)47, or, if they do firmly base their assurance on an experience, subject themselves to God’s condemnation (for He will have assurance of salvation, like salvation itself, come through faith that rests on Jesus Christ as evidently set forth in the Scriptures, and through faith only). One dreadful effect of the “mystical syllogism” has always been the encouragement of the people who sit under such teaching to seek

47 It is a wonder to me that all mystics and “experientialists” do not go stark, raving mad, always seeking a feeling, always trying to maintain a feeling, always basing salvation or assurance on a feeling, and, if they have such a feeling, always secretly fearing that the feeling might not be all it could be, or even that the feeling is no genuine operation of the Spirit at all. It is a great mercy of God to our physical and emotional life, as well as to the spiritual state of our soul, that salvation is by faith, not by feeling.

April 2009 35 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal bizarre, direct revelations from God as evidence that they are saved, and to suppose that they have received such revelations. Fred van Lieburg relates a number of these incidents in the lives of eighteenth century Dutch pietists. One Egbert de Goede languished in doubt of his salvation for years, even though, according to his own confession, he believed in Christ and “was justified.” Only when he heard a voice, “I remember your sins no more,” and the preacher spoke on this very text the following Sunday did Egbert (by this coincidence) have “confirmation of his reconciliation to God.”48 Hermanus Hermsen “received a vision in which I clearly saw our dear Lord Jesus…. It was as if heaven opened,” etc.49 Salvation is not by mysticism. Assurance is not a matter of feelings. The Spirit does not work assurance by extraordinary experience. Rather, the Spirit assures elect believers of their salvation in the same way in which the Spirit saves them, namely, by faith in Jesus Christ, as He is preached in the gospel of the Scriptures. Assurance is a gift of God in Christ to the elect child of God. It is a purely gracious gift. It is as much a gracious gift as is faith, or regeneration, or the future resurrection of the body. Assurance is not earned, or obtained, by works. It is not something that believers must strive after for years by heroic spiritual efforts and that only a few make themselves worthy of. In that grand passage on assurance, Romans 8:15, 16, the apostle declares, about all the believers in the congregation in Rome and about their true children, the children of the promise, that “Ye have received

48 Fred van Lieburg, Living for God: Eighteenth-Century Dutch Pietist Autobiography, tr. Annemie Godbehere (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 65. 49 van Lieburg, 87. The autobiographies of the people influenced by the Puritan doctrine of the “mystical syllogism” are full of such visions, voices, dreams, indescribable experiences of God, and providential occurrences supposedly signifying salvation or the certainty of salvation. They are also replete with horrifying visions and dreams of Satan, death, and hell, which were thought to have spiritual significance. The people are mostly to be pitied. Their teachers are altogether to be blamed.

36 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” The Spirit is the seal and earnest, that is, the assurer and assurance of salvation, by His witness with the spirits of the believers. Believers do not get, or obtain, or make themselves worthy of the Spirit by their hard working. Rather, they receive Him. They receive Him as God’s free, gracious gift to them for Christ’s sake. “You do not have assurance of salvation,” Puritanism tells the believer, “at least not by virtue of possessing true, justifying faith. You must work hard and long to obtain it, and you cannot be sure you will ever get it.” “You have the Spirit of adoption bearing witness with your spirit that you are the child of God, and, therefore, you have assurance of your own salvation,” the gospel of grace assures every believer. “You have received it. Therefore, be grateful for it, and live in the comfort of it.” Puritan theologians and their followers speak anxiously of the “quest” for assurance. Reformed orthodoxy thankfully rejoices in the “gift” of assurance. The Spirit works assurance, not the believer himself. The Spirit works assurance by means of faith, as faith hears the gospel, believes on Christ presented in the gospel, and is the instru- ment of justification. As Ephesians 1:13 teaches, having heard the word of truth, the gospel of our salvation, and having believed the gospel, and in Jesus Christ presented in the gospel, we were sealed in Christ with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit binds the word of God on the regenerated heart of the elect child of God, so that he believes the word of God concerning Jesus Christ and believes on Christ for forgiveness and eternal life. Precisely in this way—the way of hearing and believing—and at this moment—the moment of hearing and believing—the Spirit witnesses to the spirit of the believer that the believer is forgiven and saved, as Romans 8:16 teaches. Precisely in this same way and at the same moment—the way and moment of hearing and believing the gospel—the Spirit Himself witnesses with the believer’s spirit to the believer himself that he is a child of God. This witness of the Spirit to the believer with the witness of the

April 2009 37 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal believer’s own spirit is mysterious. But it is not mystical. It is not “immediate” and “direct,” that is, a witness, a voice, a “whisper,” different from, apart from, and alongside the word that the believer hears from the mouth of the preacher, or reads on the pages of Scripture. Rather, the believer hears the witness of the Spirit to him that he is a child of God, as an overwhelming, convincing, not-to-be-doubted, assuring personal certainty of forgiveness and salvation, in and by the gospel that is read and preached. The Spirit witnesses through the word of truth, not otherwise (Rom. 1:15-17). Thus, and thus only, does Jehovah God “say unto my soul, I am thy salvation” (Ps. 35:3). Believers receive the Spirit, also with regard to His sealing work, by the hearing of faith, not otherwise (Gal. 3:2).50 To seek the witness of the Spirit for assurance elsewhere than in the reading and preaching of the Scriptures is foolish, wicked unbelief. To suppose that one has heard the Spirit’s “whisper” assuring of salvation in dreams, visions, strange happenings, or a voice in the night is delusion, or the experience of other spirits.51

50 What the Canons of Dordt confess as Reformed orthodoxy concerning the assurance of preservation to final salvation holds as well for assurance of present salvation: “This assurance, however, [which, according to the Canons of Dordt, V/9, all “true believers may and do obtain”], is not produced by any peculiar revelation contrary to, or independent of the Word of God, but springs from faith in God’s promises, which he has most abundantly revealed in his Word for our comfort; from the testimony of the Holy Spirit, witnessing with our spirit, that we are children and heirs of God (Rom. 8:16); and, lastly, from a serious and holy desire to preserve a good conscience, and to perform good works” (Canons of Dordt, V/10, in Schaff, Creeds, vol. 3, 594; emphasis added). 51 The evil of Puritanism’s “mystical syllogism” with regard to assurance of present salvation is that condemned by the Canons of Dordt regarding assurance of future perseverance in salvation: “The Synod rejects the errors of those…who teach that without a special revelation we can have no certainty of future perseverance in this life. For by this doctrine the sure comfort of the true believers is taken away in this life, and the doubts of the papist are again introduced into the church, while the Holy Scriptures constantly deduce this assurance, not from a special and extraordinary revelation, but from

38 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

Beyond “Mere Faith” It was basic to the Puritan error concerning assurance that the leading Puritan theologians taught the Spirit gives assurance by a “direct” and “immediate” work and witness. In his explanation of the sealing with the Spirit, which gives assurance, Thomas Goodwin maintained that this is “an immediate assurance of the Holy Ghost, by a heavenly and divine light.” Goodwin contrasted this work of the Spirit with the Spirit’s work “by…[the] promises” [of the gospel].”52 Goodwin went on to describe sealing as “the impress of the immediate seal of the Spirit” and “an immediate witness of the Spirit.”53 Richard Sibbes wrote that the Spirit gives assurance “immediately.” It is a work of the Spirit “by way of [the Spirit’s] presence… without discourse.”54 In sealing some believers, “the Spirit speaks to us by a kind of secret whispering and intimation.”55 It is true that Goodwin thought to safeguard his “immediate witness of the Spirit” against “enthusiasms” by insisting that the “immediate witness” of the Spirit “is not that it is without the Word.” When the Spirit witnesses to some believers that they are the children of God, “it is the Spirit applying the Word to the heart that we speak of.”56 Sibbes likewise had the Spirit immediately whispering Bible texts to some believers.57 But these provisos and caveats did not, in fact, rescue the Pu- ritan doctrine of assurance from mysticism’s teaching of salvation as the soul’s experience of immediate contact with God. For, first, the marks proper to the children of God and from the constant promises of God” (Canons of Dordt, V, Rejection of Errors/5, in The Confessions and the Church Order of the Protestant Reformed Churches, Grandville, MI: Prot- estant Reformed Churches in America, 2005, 177; emphasis added [Schaff does not give the Rejection of Errors sections of the Canons in English]). 52 Goodwin, Works, 233. 53 Goodwin, Works, 237, 241. 54 Richard Sibbes, Works of Richard Sibbes, vol. 5, Expositions and Treatises from Portions of Several of the Epistles of St. Paul, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, repr. 1977), 440. 55 Sibbes, Works, vol. 3, 456. 56 Goodwin, Works, 250. 57 Sibbes, Works, vol. 3, 456.

April 2009 39 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal the repeated, emphatic affirmation of assurance as “immediate” and “direct” in the context of an experience of “overpowering light” and of “secret whisperings of the Spirit” inevitably opened the way both in the teaching of ministers and in the thinking and practice of the people to views and experiences of assurance that quite ignored the preaching of the word, the promises of the gospel, and Bible texts. More importantly, once Goodwin had distinguished the “immediate testimony” of the Spirit that gives assurance from the testimony of the gospel of the blood of Jesus Christ and the corroborating testimony of the believer’s life of sanctification as a testimony “beyond all these”58 and once he had described “immediate assurance” as a “light beyond the light of ordinary faith,”59 he had committed himself and his followers to mysticism’s way of salvation, namely, sheer experience, apart from and “beyond” faith in Jesus Christ as presented in the preaching of the promise of the gospel. In his enthusiasm for the extraordinary work of the Spirit of assuring some believers by an “overpowering light” and an “immediate witness,” Goodwin dared to disparage the faith that believes on the crucified Jesus Christ and trusts His atoning blood as “mere faith.”

When a man that is a believer looks upon Christ, there is a fresh flowing of the blood, and that strengtheneth faith; no man looks upon Christ but cometh off more cheerly; but this is a weak witness. Then cometh in water, that witnesseth too; but yet, I say, if you mark it, here is the Spirit, that differeth from both these, therefore there is a further testimony than either from a man’s sanctification or frommere faith.60

“Mere faith”! This phrase, all by itself, exposes the Puritan doctrine of assurance. It betrays as well the fundamental error of the Puritan doctrine: denial that true, justifying, saving faith is assurance of salvation. True, justifying, saving faith is “mere” faith, in Puritan thinking, because

58 Goodwin, Works, 233, 234. 59 Goodwin, Works, 236. 60 Goodwin, Works, 233; emphasis added.

40 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance the best and greatest aspect of salvation—assurance—comes to a few in some other way. The actual application and practical fruit of the Puritan doctrine of assurance are indicated, not only in the autobiographical account of the lives of simple Dutch farmers in the eighteenth century, but also in D. M. Lloyd-Jones’ glowing description of the supposed obtaining of assurance by a number of illustrious persons whose experiences are proposed as examples for all believers. Flavel had “ravishing tastes of heavenly joys” as he was out walking. Edwards had a “view…of the glory of the Son of God” as he was riding his horse in the woods. Moody was filled with the Spirit “one day in the city of New York.” Christmas Evans had the “experience” as he was “traveling over a mountain-pass.” Where Whitefield was when the “Spirit of God took possession” of his soul, Lloyd-Jones does not inform the reader, but evidently Whitefield was not in church hearing the preaching of the gospel and using the sacraments with the congregation. Wesley’s heart was “strangely warmed” as he was strolling up Aldersgate Street.61 Not one of these proposed examples for all Christians was assured of his salvation at church on the Lord’s Day under the preaching of the gospel and while using the sacraments. Not one was sealed by the Spirit by means of faith that heard the promise of the gospel and trusted in Christ for forgiveness. Not one was even reading the Bible. Of none of these notable examples of assurance does Lloyd-Jones record that the content of their “experience” was the truth—the doctrinal truth—of Holy Scripture. Rather, their assurance consisted of a vague feeling.62

61 Lloyd-Jones, 275-278. 62 The Puritan doctrine of assurance is classic mysticism. “The hallmark of mysticism is subjectivism, since the center of gravity is shifted from the objective work of God outside us, the acquiring of salvation, to the subjective; not the sure Christ but the sure Christian is the ground upon which one depends. Along this line, the Word of God is made to play second fiddle to the inner witness of the Spirit; experience is cut loose from Scripture; many are enthusiasts for the ‘inner light’; and in the end it is not the revelation of God that is decisive, but what we experience (Dutch: bevinden) in our hearts. From this results also the mistaken conception of faith and of the assurance

April 2009 41 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

By the Truth The Spirit assures of salvation in the same way that He saves: by means of faith that hears and believes the word of God. For the believer’s assurance of salvation, this word is, and must be, the truth, that is, the gospel of sovereign grace, at the heart of which is the gracious, unconditional promise. According to Ephesians 1:13, the sealing accompanies one’s hearing “the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.” II Corinthians 1:22 affirms that God has sealed us, in the context of the declaration that the promises of God in Christ are “yea, and in him [Jesus Christ] Amen” (v. 20). Romans 8:16 intends to teach that the Spirit bears witness with the spirit of the believer, not by means of any religious teaching whatever, not by means of a false gospel of a universal love of God dependent for its saving efficacy upon the will or good works of sinners, butby the gospel taught in the book of Romans. This is the gospel of sovereign grace: grace rooted in eternal election; grace merited for elect sinners by a limited, efficacious cross; grace directed to the elect sinner by the unconditional promise; grace irresistibly worked in the elect sinner by the Holy Spirit; and grace that infallibly brings every elect saint to glory. This is the one true gospel of salvation by “God who shows mercy” (Rom. 9:16). In the false gospel of salvation by the willing or running of sinners (Rom. 9:16), there is not, and cannot be, assurance. Every form of the false gospel of conditional salvation, that is, salvation dependent upon the sinner himself, leaves men fearful, doubting, terrified. The Spirit does not seal or witness by such a message. The Spirit assures by the word of God, because He is the Spirit proceeding eternally from the second person of the Trinity, the personal Word of God. The Spirit assures by the gospel of Jesus Christ, because on Pen- tecost the Spirit became the Spirit of Jesus Christ. of faith. With regard to faith, it is dissolved in the activity of trusting, and little remains of the certainty of faith, because everything regarding assurance must take place along a prescribed, long way of many ‘spiritual conditions’ and many ‘experiences’” (“Mysticisme,” in Christelijke Encyclopaedie, vol. 4, ed. F. W. Grosheide, H. H. Landwehr, C. Lindeboom, and J. C. Rullmann, Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1925, 290, 291; the translation of the Dutch is mine).

42 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

The Spirit assures by the truth, because, as the Spirit of Christ, He is the Spirit of truth, that is, the Spirit of Scripture, of creeds and catechisms, of sound doctrine, of preaching, of faith that hears and trusts the word of God. He is not the Spirit of immediate contact with God, of extraordinary experiences, of saving acts above and beyond “mere faith.” Because He is the Holy Spirit, His assurance of the believer by means of faith is always a work that is accompanied and confirmed by His sanctifying of the believer. “As many as are led by the Spirit, they are the sons of God” (Rom. 8:14). Only in the way of a holy life can, and do, believers enjoy the assurance that they are the children of God. The Spirit witnesses with the spirit of the believer as the believer obeys God’s commandments, and only as he obeys God’s commandments. The believer has assurance as he walks in holiness of life, and only as he walks in holiness of life. This is the truth of the “practical syllogism.” Holiness is a confirming evidence of salvation to the believer, as good works are an evidence of justification.63

Whom the Spirit Assures So much is assurance an aspect of salvation itself, that the question really is, “Whom does the Spirit save?” The Spirit assures all of God’s elect, believing, sanctified people. He is the seal and earnest to all. He bears witness with their spirit to all the saints. All in Ephesus who heard and believed were sealed (Eph. 1:13). All in the congregation at Rome who received the Spirit of adoption by believing the gospel of grace were led by the Spirit and had the Spirit’s witness with their spirit that they were the children of God (Rom. 8:14-16). Every publican who cried out in repentance and faith, “God, be merciful to me the sinner,” went home justified in his (assured) consciousness (Luke 18:14). Christ taught, indeed, commanded, all who pray in faith to address God as “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9).

63 “The elect in due time…attain the assurance of this their eternal and unchangeable election…by observing in themselves…the infallible fruits of election…such as a true faith in Christ, filial fear, a godly sorrow for sin, a hungering and thirsting after righteousness, etc.” (Canons of Dordt, I/12, in Schaff, Creeds, vol. 3, 583, 584).

April 2009 43 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

There may be times of doubt. Some believers struggle with doubt more than do other believers. Some may doubt for some time. One who doubts must not conclude that he or she is an unbeliever, unfor- given, unsaved, or even a reprobate, so long as he is troubled by his doubt, struggles with it, and seeks deliverance from it in the gospel. There are spiritual causes of doubt in a believer. He may, for a time, not be hearing the word and believing, because of indifference, or minding earthly things, or bitterness toward God. He may, for a time, not be living a holy life, because of worldliness, or yielding to some temptation to sin, or entrapment by the devil. He may be grieving the Holy Spirit, by hating a brother or sister, or discontentment with God’s ways with him, or fighting the Spirit’s assuring work by a determined doubting of his salvation. He may, for a time, be the especial target of the fieriest dart that Satan throws at the soul of one who believes and confesses the truth. But this spiritual condition of the believer is unusual, abnormal, a weakness, a disease, and a severe temptation. From the disease, he must seek to be healed; against the temptation, he must fight. Where the gospel of grace is purely, soundly, and rightly preached and where Reformed pastors carry out their pastoral work diligently and wisely, using the gospel of grace as the balm in Gilead, there will not be many who doubt their salvation, nor will the doubt of a few last for many years.64

64 Regarding the possibility of a lack of the experience of “an assured confidence of soul” concerning their own election and salvation in some believers, see the Canons of Dordt, I/16, in Schaff, Creeds, vol. 3, 584, 585. The Canons do not regard this doubt as common among believers, much less as the norm. The usual and normal experience of the saints is certainty of their own election and salvation: “[Certainty of their own election to glory is] the experience of the saints, who by virtue of the consciousness of their election rejoice with the apostle and praise this favor of God (Eph. 1); who according to Christ’s admonition rejoice with His disciples that their names are written in heaven (Luke 10:20); who also place the consciousness of their election over against the fiery darts of the devil, asking: ‘Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect?’ (Rom. 8:33)” (Canons of Dordt, I, Rejec- tion of Errors/7, in The Confessions and the Church Order of the Protestant Reformed Churches, 161, 162). Certainty of their own election and salvation

44 Vol. 42, No. 2 Gift of Assurance

It is false and pernicious teaching, that assurance is intended by God only for a favored few of His believing children and that the many ought to accept doubt as their portion for many years, perhaps their lifelong, in the will of God. O believer, gratefully receive, and enjoy, assurance as the free gift of the Holy Spirit to you with and by His gift to you of faith in Jesus Christ as preached in the gospel. Do not doubt that you have a right to assurance. God wills it. Christ earned it for you. Do not quench the Spirit of assurance in you, by giving yourself over to doubt, as though doubt is the expected, even required, and therefore normal condition of believers. Do not quench the Spirit of assurance either by listening to Pu- ritan preaching that is forever questioning your assurance, forever challenging your right to assurance, forever sending you on a quest for assurance, and forever instilling doubt. The Spirit does not work assurance by means of a gospel of doubt. is the usual and normal experience of all saints, of saints as saints, not of a specially favored, or especially industrious, severely limited caste of saints. Certainty of their own salvation is the usual and normal experience of young saints as well as old saints; of new converts as well as church members of long standing; of those who are the least holy as well as the holiest in the congregation. The Canons affirm this “consciousness” and “certainty” of the saints of their own personal election and salvation as the “fruit” of election itself, against the “error” that denies certainty of one’s own election and salvation “in this life,” except for a certainty “which depends on a changeable and uncertain condition.” To deny the certainty of their own election and salvation, “in this life,” of many, if not most, believers as long as they live and to teach that those few believers who do obtain certainty do so only after many years of doubt, and then only on the basis of an ineffable “experience” (a highly “changeable and uncertain condition”), are not only to strip faith of half its essence (“a hearty trust”), despoil Jesus Christ of part of His saving work—the experiential part (“he also assures me of eternal life”), denigrate the work of the Holy Spirit (He is the Comforter, who “comforts me”), and rob believers of peace (“peace I leave with you”), but also to make election itself ineffective and fruitless: the certainty of election and salvation is the “fruit” of election.

April 2009 45 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Listen to the Spirit’s witness in you by the gospel of grace, and to the witness of your own spirit as the Spirit testifies to your spirit, and be certain—absolutely certain (which is the only certainty there is). And cry out, with all believers, young and old, aged saints who have been members of the church all their lives and recent converts, godly parents and covenant children, “Abba, Father.” l

46 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History Survey of Southern Presbyterian History(2)1 Eugene Case

Expansion and Division At the end of the colonial era, the Presbyterian Church was among the largest, if not the largest, and most influential church in the new nation. By the turn of the century, however, this dominant position was seriously threatened. As people began to move to the west, the Presbyterian Church was unable to keep up with the demands of a population on the move. The strict requirements for a trained ministry resulted in a shortage of men to go into the new areas of settlement and establish new churches. The Methodists and the Baptists, not being encumbered by such educational requirements, were soon overwhelming the Presbyterians.

The Plan of Union In 1801, in an effort to facilitate the work on the western frontier, the Presbyterian Church entered into an agreement with the Congregationalists, which were located mainly in New England, and whose numbers approximated those of the Presbyterians. This “Plan of Union,” as it was called, had little immediate effect in the South, because there were few Congregationalists in the region. Soon, however, it became evident to sound men throughout the church that the problems of this arrangement far outweighed the benefits. Under the terms of this plan, the ministers of one denomination could serve in the churches of the other, with the churches conducting

1 This article is reconstructed from notes prepared for a lecture delivered at the Seminary of the Protestant Reformed Churches in April 2008. Inas- much as that venue did not require the sort of documentation one expects in a written format, no footnotes were attached. In preparation for publication, an attempt has been made, in the case of direct quotations, to give appropriate citation. A bibliography of sources has been included, and history being what it is, there would seem to be little point to the multiplication of citations from books that are themselves, very often, multiplications of citations.

April 2009 47 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal their affairs according to the principles of the denomination to which it belonged, and the ministers under the jurisdiction of the denomination to which they belonged. In cases of dispute, matters might be referred to either a Presbytery or a Congregational association, or to a committee composed of members from both groups. And, in cases where a congregation was made up of members of both denominations, the local church government would be in the hands of a committee chosen by the church, with appeals of decisions by that committee from Presbyterians going to the Presbytery (in which members of the committee of the church would be allowed to sit and act as elders of the Presbyterian Church), and appeals from Congregationalist members referred to the body of the communicants in accord with their polity. This duckbill-platypus approach to ecclesiology was matched by a polyglot theology arising from the Congregationalist side of this arrangement—especially Hopkinsianism (which denied the imputation of the guilt of Adam’s sin) and similar modifications of the Calvinistic system. The Plan of Union was, from the beginning, a ‘train wreck’ waiting to happen; and it would lead to the most significant disruption of the Presbyterian Church in this country prior to the secession of the Southern Churches in 1861.

The Cumberland Presbyterian Schism Meanwhile, in the South, the problems with securing ministers for the western frontier led to a different kind of problem—a problem that was manifested most seriously within the bounds of the Synod of Virginia, which, at the time, included all of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The early nineteenth century saw significant growth in the Synod of Virginia, much of this the result of a revival of religion that began at the Hampton-Sydney College, a Presbyterian-founded school in that state. After the War for Independence, the college had been much affected by the deistic and Unitarian principles that had gained popularity in the late colonial period. The President of the school, John Blair Smith, with the elders of two nearby churches, began to pray about the situation. Then student prayer meetings began to take

48 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History place as well; and this awakening of religious interest began to spread. Among those who took note of this revival, as it was called, was the Reverend James McGready, who adopted the methods he had observed and attempted to apply them in connection with his new work in North Carolina. These revivalistic measures did not meet with favor there, however, and McGready moved to Kentucky, where he and other revival preachers found a more receptive audience. One of the features of the Kentucky revival was the “camp meeting.” These camp meetings, at first, were much like the communion seasons referred to previously, though on a somewhat larger scale. One of these meetings, in fact, attracted about 25,000 people, who were exhorted, day and night, by twenty-five preachers. Some exceedingly strange things began happening: people barking like dogs; jerking of the body, so violent that the long hair braids of some of the women began to snap like whips; others falling into a catatonic state. These unseemly antics reached a point where some of the ministers felt led to preach such texts as “Let all things be done decently and in order.” A reaction to these sorts of excesses set in, and soon Kentucky Presbyterians were divided between the revivalists and the anti-revivalists. By comparison, the Old Side- New Side controversy half a century earlier had been a model of decorum and orthodoxy. Matters came to a head in the Presbytery of the Cumberland. This Presbytery, under the pressure of finding enough ministers to deal with the explosive growth in church membership, began to cut corners in the selection of ministers. Not only did the Presbytery ordain men to the ministry who had not received the standard theological education, but there were also a good many of these ill-prepared ordinands who rejected the high Calvinism of the Westminster Standards—particularly the doctrines of election and reprobation, limited atonement, and the perseverance of the saints. To show just how ignorant these men were, they included among the doctrines that they rejected that of “infant damnation,” which, of course, is neither taught nor so much as implied by the Confession. Cumberland Presbytery’s licensing of illiterate exhorters after examination only on “experimental religion” and motive for entering the

April 2009 49 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal ministry, and their demonstration of the ability to deliver a discourse, led the Synod of Kentucky to step in and dissolve the Presbytery of the Cumberland, placing it back under the jurisdiction of the Presbytery of Transylvania. The Presbytery of the Cumberland complained to the General Assembly that the Synod of Kentucky had overstepped its authority by superseding the rights and powers of the Presbytery in the examination of ministers. The Assembly unanimously rejected the complaint. And in 1810 the Cumberland Presbyterian Church was organized, spreading across Kentucky and Tennessee in particular, where it remains a significant presence to this day. Dr. Morton Smith quotes Philip Schaff’s description of the Cum- berland Presbyterian Church as “half Calvinistic and half Arminian.”2 The description is too generous, literally, by half.

Southern Seminaries Established In response to the increasing need for ministers to serve an ex- panding church, greater attention was given to the establishment of theological seminaries. Princeton, in New Jersey, was opened in 1812; but this was far removed from Southern Churches and Southern needs. Theological training had been given at Liberty Hall Academy (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia in the late 1700s; and in 1806 funds were raised for a theological library and professorship at Hampton-Sydney. Little was accomplished in the direction of better theological education, however, until Hanover Presbytery called John Holt Rice to this work. Rice was convinced of three things: first, that the majority of Southern students were not likely to venture North for training; second, that men from the North generally were not fitted to ministry in the South; and third, that unless theological training was set up in a Southern venue, the state of religion in the South would deteriorate significantly. Due largely to his efforts, a seminary opened its doors as a separate institution from Hampton-Sydney College in 1824. With the assumption of control and oversight by the Synods of Virginia and North Carolina, the seminary was named “Union Seminary.” Though Rice aspired, as he wrote, to take young men “out of their

2 Smith, Studies in Southern Presbyterian Theology, p. 31.

50 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History dark corners and bring them into the Church through the seminary,” he was also very clear as to what sort of men would be tolerated. “Allow me,” he wrote, “to say that in this Southern region, we do not want any body who thinks he has made new discoveries in religion...in a word, the people here know nothing of the Isms which have plagued you all to the North; and we do not wish them to know.” What was wanted, he said, was “a man who will just preach the Bible honestly and faithfully.”3 Farther South, though Presbyterians in South Carolina and Georgia had contributed generously to the Assembly’s school at Princeton, there was also feeling among them that circumstances indicated the need for a seminary in their jurisdiction. As early as 1817, the Presbytery of Hopewell in South Carolina had proposed such a school. The Synod of South Carolina and Georgia took up the cause; and in 1828 “The Theological Seminary of the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia” opened in Lexington, Georgia, with one professor, five students, and no building. In 1830, the seminary was moved to Columbia, South Carolina. It was there that the man who was to set the tone for theological education at the school, Dr. George Howe, joined the faculty. He would remain for over fifty years, as the teacher and the colleague of such men as James Thornwell, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, and John L. Girardeau, in what would become perhaps the most distinctive of the Southern seminaries, and the one in which fidelity to the old paths was maintained for the longest period of time.

The Old School/New School Division The problems inherent in the Plan of Union established in 1801 continued to fester for a period of thirty-five years. As time went on, the differences that, at first, had not seemed important, began to work themselves out, and the church became sharply, and almost evenly, divided. Though it is something of an oversimplification to reduce the division to one of national origins, it did reflect, to a considerable degree, the obvious cultural differences of the nation as a whole. On the one side stood those who were largely of Scots and Scots-Irish background, a significant portion of whom were found in the South.

3 Quoted in Street, The Story of Southern Presbyterians, p. 39.

April 2009 51 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

On the other side were those of English background, a large portion of which were found in New England. The former became known as the Old School; the latter was known as the New School. Of course, there were numbers of Old School men also in the northern part of the church; and there were some in the South who held to New School views. But the Southern churches were overwhelmingly in the Old School camp, and much of the leadership of the Old School came from the South. There were a number of issues in the controversy. Ecclesiasti- cally, the Plan of Union, in several different aspects of it, was simply incompatible with Presbyterian polity; and those who were committed to Presbytery as the pattern of church government delivered from the mount chafed under the arrangement that, frankly, conceded much more to Congregationalism than to Presbyterianism. Theologically, there was a difference of opinion as to what was subscribed vis-a-vis the Westminster Standards—whether officebearers were required to subscribe the Confession and Catechisms themselves, or whether it was the system of doctrine that was being subscribed. Those of the Old School maintained the former; the New School said it was sufficient to go with the latter. Then there was increasing agitation about what C.N. Willborn has called “the American tar baby”4—the issue of Negro slavery.5 The differences between the Old School and the New School came to a head at the General Assembly of 1837. At that Assembly, 4 If the imagery is unfamiliar, the reader must by all means secure a copy of the delightful Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris. 5 The New School, in many areas, was dominated by anti-slavery sentiment, one of the hotbeds of which was the Chillicothe Presbytery in the State of Ohio. In the early 1830s that Presbytery sent a communication to the Presbytery of Mississippi, calling upon the members of the latter to desist from what the Ohio Presbytery called ‘the sin of slavery.’ The Reverend James Smylie, who had come to Mississippi from North Carolina in 1805, and was the founder of several churches in Southwest Mississippi (including one in which this writer presently pastors some of his descendants), prepared a very full reply to the Chillicothe abolitionists, which was one of the earliest pro-slavery arguments, predating R.L. Dabney’s famous Defense of Virginia and the South, by over thirty years.

52 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History which, for the first time in several years, was controlled by the Old School men, the Plan of Union of 1801 was abrogated as unconstitutional. And, on the principle that an unconstitutional act involves the unconstitutionality of all that is done under it, the Old School party effectively put out of the Presbyterian Church four synods, five hundred and thirty-three churches, and more than one hundred thousand members. Southerners were in the forefront of the actions taken by the Old School. Dr. George Baxter of Union Seminary presided over the pre-Assembly meeting at which was drawn up the “Testimony and Memorial” condemning the errors of the New School party. Dr. Robert Breckinridge, native of Kentucky, laboring in Baltimore at the time, was the primary author of the “Testimony.” William Swan Plumer of Virginia was the first moderator of the Old School Assembly in 1838, having taken a leading part in the work of separation. At the Assembly the following year, commissioners from the expelled synods and presbyteries were denied seats, and thus departed to form their own separate Assembly. The result, then, was two Presbyterian Churches of roughly the same size, with the same name, each claiming to be the true continuation of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Dr. Benjamin Morgan Palmer summed up the matter thus: “The disruption was effected. The Old and New Schools were now distinctly apart; and those who stood by the Constitution of the Church, in a strict interpretation of her symbols of doctrine and principles of government, rejoiced in a great deliverance.”6 In the South, three-quarters or better of the Presbyterian Churches went with the Old School. Among those who sided with the New School, the reason was not so much their doctrinal agreement with the theological and ecclesiastical latitudinarianism of the New School, but their disagreement with the manner in which the separation had been effected.

6 Palmer, Benjamin Morgan, The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell, Richmond, Virginia, Whittet & Shepperson, 1875, p. 209.

April 2009 53 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Southern Attempts to Influence the Old School Assembly More than one-third of the reconstituted Assembly of the Old School Church was located in the South, and there was an incremental increase in the influence of Southern churchmen. Several Southern men, including the notable James Thornwell, were elected as Modera- tors of the General Assembly; and eight of the Assembly meetings between 1844 and 1861 were held in the South. Princeton Seminary sought to lure Robert L. Dabney and Benjamin M. Palmer to its faculty. The voices of Thornwell and Robert Breckinridge were often heard on the floor of the Assembly debating the great issues before the Church. The years following the division were spent in missionary work (especially among the Negro slaves), in the establishment of educational institutions, and in the publication of books and periodicals. One of the most significant of the latter was The Southern Pres- byterian Review, established in 1847, and a treasure trove of Southern Presbyterian thought. The Review was particularly valuable as a plat- form for the engagement of two significant issues still pending in the Old School Assembly: the role of the ruling elder, and the propriety (or lack thereof) of committing the work of the church to ecclesiastical boards.7

The Place of the Ruling Elder In regard to the place of the ruling elder in the life of the church, there were two great questions that occupied the attention of the Old School Assembly. The first of these questions had to do with whether the presence of ruling elders is necessary to establish a quorum for a meeting of Presbytery. The other question was whether it is proper for a ruling elder to “lay on hands” in the ordination of a minister. To

7 Inasmuch as these two issues will be dealt with at some length in a subsequent article of this series on Southern Presbyterianism, we will touch but lightly upon them at this time. But it is interesting to note that in the debates over these matters, the leading figures were, on the one side, Charles Hodge, unquestionably the most respected theologian of the Old School; and, on the other side, James Henley Thornwell, the man who, more than any other, would shape the ecclesiastical life of Southern Presbyterianism.

54 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History these questions, Dr. Hodge answered “No.” James Thornwell, and his colleague Robert Breckinridge, said, “Yes.” When the matter was debated at the Assembly of 1843, the majority of commissioners sided with Hodge. Gradually, however, Thornwell’s views gained acceptance and became the position of the Southern Presbyterian Church—something about which we will have more to say, D.V., in our considerations of the distinctives of Southern Presbyterianism.

The Argument over Church Boards One of the issues in the Old School/New School conflict had involved the use of independent boards in the conduct of much of the work of the church. Organizations such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions were the agencies through which the church did its work in the areas indicated. Materials for religious education were similarly produced. The training of ministers, at least at the beginning, was committed to institutions that were, at best, only indirectly controlled by the church. This method was cordially embraced by the Congregationalists and those of New School sympathies, generally. Those of the Old School, on the other hand, believed that the church should conduct its work through agencies under its control. So, after the division of 1837-38, denominational boards were set up by the Old School Assembly to do the work lately performed by the independent agencies. There were many in the Old School Assembly, however, who found this arrangement to be little improvement over the previous system. They pointed out that, for all practical purposes, the denominational boards functioned, in large measure, in the same manner as independent boards. And, though these boards had large memberships, often awarded to those who made significant financial contributions, the real work was done by the executive committees of these boards, which reported to the boards themselves, which in turn reported to the Assembly, but without much practical oversight of the work on the part of the Assembly. A debate over this matter ensued. Once again, the principal an- tagonists in the debate were Doctors Hodge and Thornwell, with Hodge

April 2009 55 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal supporting the boards and Thornwell opposing them. Thornwell’s position was that the work of the church was the work of the church, and that this work could not be assigned to any agency of the church’s own creation, but should be undertaken within the structure of the polity provided for in Holy Scripture. He did not oppose a combined or united effort on the part of the Church, but insisted that any centralized agency should be limited to carrying out directives received from the courts of the church. Hodge, on the other hand, argued that there was no substantial difference between what Thornwell proposed and the then current procedure. Once again, the Assembly sided with Hodge. But Thornwell’s views would prevail in the Southern Assembly—at least at the beginning. Moreover, the whole question of the efficiency of the church as such to carry out its mission continues to be a matter of debate down to this very day.

The Assembly of 1861 The period between the division of the Old and New Schools and the division of the Old School Assembly in 1861 was one that saw a number of other denominations split over the sectional issues that divided Americans in general—in particular, the issue of slavery, which had become a major point of contention between North and South in about 1820. By the time of the outbreak of the War to Prevent South- ern Independence, the Baptists, the Methodists, and the New School Presbyterian Assembly had all separated into Northern and Southern factions owing mainly to controversies related to slavery. Only the Old School Presbyterian Church had been able to maintain unity in regard to this question. The Old School Assembly had declared, in 1845, that slaveholding was not forbidden in Scripture and was not, therefore, a bar to communion in the church. The position taken was that slavery was a domestic institution; and like other domestic relations—as, for example, the relationship of husband and wife, or of parents and children—slavery was subject to regulation by Scripture. That there were liable to be abuses in connection with this institution was a fact admitted by all. But it was argued that one might as well agitate for the abolition of

56 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History marriage on account of the occasional wifebeater, or for the abolition of the family on account of the occasional unseemliness that occurs in the context of that institution, as to argue for the abolition of slavery on the basis of the admitted problems involved in the institution.8 The Old School Assembly, on the basis of this understanding, was able to maintain peace in regard to the slavery issue. That peaceful co-existence was shattered, however, by the events of 1860 and 1861, beginning with the election of a sectional candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to the presidency of the United States, followed by the secession from the Union of South Carolina and several other Southern States. By the time the Old School Assembly convened in Philadelphia in May of 1861, sectional passions were running high. Fort Sumter had fallen; Lincoln had called for volunteers to subjugate the Southern secessionists; and the Philadelphia newspapers, carrying articles on the Old School Assembly, published demands for a strong expression by that Assembly in support of the Union. The matter was further complicated by the fact that only a few commissioners from the Southern portion of the church were able or willing to be in attendance. At first it appeared that there was a determination on the part of the commissioners to keep sectional political issues from becoming a pretext for division in the Assembly. Indeed, the opening sermon was on the text, “My kingdom is not of this world.” On the third day of the Assembly, however, Dr. Gardiner Spring, pastor of the Brick Church in New York City, proposed that a committee be appointed with a view to the possibility of some expression of devotion to the Union and loyalty to the government. The motion was tabled. Two

8 Significantly, some of the most ardent defenders of slavery—such as Charles Colcock Jones of Georgia, and the aforementioned James Smylie of Mississippi—were also the most insistent that domestic servants be taught the principles of Christianity and treated as Christian brethren. Smylie, in fact, kept himself in considerable trouble with slaveholders whom he regularly excoriated for what he perceived as deficiencies in their dealings with their slaves. And Jones, who wrote a treatise on the religious education of the slaves, was known to have brought charges against anyone whom he personally knew to be guilty of an offense against a Negro servant.

April 2009 57 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal days later Dr. Spring offered a second resolution, which would acknowledge the Assembly’s loyalty to the Federal government. The committee charged with the review of this resolution recommended, by a vote of eight to one, that the resolution be rejected as touching upon matters explicitly prohibited to Synods and Councils by the Confession of Faith. The Assembly, however, by a vote of 154 to 66, adopted the report of the minority of one on the committee, stating that it was the obligation of the Church to promote and perpetuate the integrity of the United States, “and to strengthen, uphold, and encour- age the Federal government in the exercise of all its functions.”9 As Dr. Palmer noted, “This paper, from its very terms, was simply a writ of ejectment of all that portion of the church within the bounds of eleven States, which had already withdrawn from the Federal Union, and established a government of their own.”10 A protest against the adoption of the Spring Resolutions was entered, signed by fifty-eight members of the Assembly. The protest concluded with a statement of the conviction of its signatories that “The General Assembly in thus deciding a political question, and in making that decision practically a condition of Church membership, has, in our judgment, violated the Constitution of the Church, and usurped the prerogative of its Divine Master.”11 The author of that protest, by the way, was not one of the commissioners from the then-seceded State of Mississippi, nor even one from Kentucky, Maryland, or Missouri, but was none other than Dr. Charles Hodge. The only effect of the protest, however, was to prevent, for the time being, an exodus from the Assembly by members of the border state synods. The Spring Resolutions were not the cause of the division of the Old School Assembly. As a practical matter, it is unlikely that a united church could have been continued in two separate nations—especially two nations at war with one another. These resolutions did ensure, however, that the division that took place would not be a peaceful one; and the bitterness engendered by it guaranteed that the division would

9 Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, vol. I,, p. 564. 10 Palmer, Thornwell’s Life and Letters, pp. 501-502. 11 Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, vol. I, p. 565.

58 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History continue long after the South had been subjugated to the centralized government that resulted from the Union victory in the war.

“Our Southern Zion” The First General Assembly In August of 1861, a conference of ministers and elders from Southern Presbyterian churches was held in Atlanta. From this conference, there was sent a call to all the Southern Presbyteries to meet in Assembly at the First Presbyterian Church of Augusta, Georgia, in December of that year. Fifty ministers and thirty-eight elders from forty-seven Presbyteries, representing close to eleven hundred churches and seventy-five thousand members, responded to that call. When the Assembly convened, Dr. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, and, in the judgment of many, the preeminent preacher, not only of that era, but in the whole history of Southern Presbyterianism, ascended the pulpit. His text was Ephesians, chapter one, verses twenty-two and twenty-three: “And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, Which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” His theme was “The Supreme Dominion to Which Christ is Exalted as Head of the Church, and the Glory of the Church in that Relation, as Being at Once His Body and His Fullness.” In his sermon, Palmer made only brief reference to what had brought those assembled to this occasion. “But a little while since,” he reminded them, “it was attempted in the most August court of our Church to place the crown of our Lord upon the head of Caesar—to bind that body, which is Christ’s fulness, to the chariot in which that Caesar rides. The intervening months have sufficiently discovered the character of that State, under whose yoke this Church was summoned to bow her neck in meek obedience.... And now this Parliament of the Lord’s freemen solemnly declares that, by the terms of her great charter, none but Jesus may be the King in Zion.”12

12 Johnson, Thomas Cary, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Morgan Palmer, Edinburgh, The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987, p. 261.

April 2009 59 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

For the rest, his subject was the Church.

Through the unfolding ages she has moved securely on, while di- sastrous change has ground to powder and scattered to the winds the proudest dynasties of earth. Kings have bound her with fetters of brass; but the fair captive has taken again her harp from the willows, and God has made her walls salvation and her gates praise. Amidst the fires of martyrdom she has risen younger from the ashes of her own funeral pile. Wooing the nations with her accents of love, she lengthens her cords to gather them into her broad pavilion. And when the whole frame of nature shall be dissolved, she will stand serene above the burning earth, to welcome her descending Lord. Caught up by Him into the heavens, she will gather into her communion there all the elder sons of God; still the immortal Church of the Redeemer, out-living all time and henceforth counting her years upon the dial of eternity.13

The Assembly adopted “An Address to All the Churches of Jesus Christ”—principally the work of Dr. Thornwell. In this “Address” the reasons for the separate existence of the Southern Church were vindicated, and the positive character that the Church aspired to display before the world was set forth. Among the latter were a faithful adherence to the Constitution of the Church, a careful conformity to the principle of the spirituality of the Church, and a determination “to rely upon the regular organs of… our Presbyterian system of government.” Pursuant to the last of these stated purposes, the system of boards in use in the pre-division Old School Assembly was scrapped, and executive committees, chosen by, dependent upon, and responsible to the Assembly were established. The idea was that the church should be its own missionary society and its own educational society.

13 Johnson, Palmer’s Life and Letters, pp. 260-261. It is, no doubt, a sign of how far we have fallen that where once men listened to such exalted and majestic phrases, they content themselves now with the pathetic drivel of such imposters as Joel Osteen.

60 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History

Mission Work The high aspirations expressed at the first Assembly of the Pres- byterian Church in the Confederate States of America were subject, of course, in some degree at least, to the harsh realities of total war as unleashed by the Lincoln government. Thus, for example, the Assembly of 1862, originally scheduled to meet in Memphis, was moved to Montgomery because of the battle of Shiloh. The single most influential minister in the Assembly, Dr. Thornwell, died in August of that same year. The 1863 Assembly was in session when news was received of the death, on May 10th, of the Confederacy’s greatest general—Thomas Jonathan Jackson, who was a Presbyterian of extraordinary faithfulness and piety. The Synod of Nashville was unable to meet for the duration of the war due to the unsettled conditions in Tennessee. And the Presbytery of New Orleans, after the capture of that city by the Federal army, was forced to meet in two sections. Columbia and Union seminaries were barely able to carry on, with prospective students and some faculty serving in the army, funds unavailable, and facilities threatened by the devastation wrought by the invaders. Many church buildings were destroyed or damaged, and congregations decimated and scattered, particularly in Carolina and Georgia in the wake of the regime of rape, murder, and pillage carried out by Mr. Lincoln’s favorite General, William Tecumseh Sherman, who followed the British model of total warfare on civilian populations. The church, nevertheless, attempted, as best could be done, to perform her calling. In 1861, Dr. Charles Colcock Jones urged the Assembly to press on with the work among the Negro slaves; and, in 1863, it was reported that more work was being done among this population than ever before. Similar concern was directed toward the Indian population, especially the Choctaws and Cherokees. By far the greatest undertaking, however, was in the work done among the soldiers of the Confederate army. Not a few of the Con- federate general officers—among them D.H. Hill and T.J. Jackson— were members of the Presbyterian Church. General Lee, though an Episcopalian, in his writings gave evidence of being definitely of the Calvinistic branch of that denomination, and was thoroughly

April 2009 61 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal concerned for the spiritual welfare of the men under his command. Ministers were welcomed, for the most part; and men such as John Waddell, Tucker Lacy, Moses Drury Hoge, and R.L. Dabney—some of the most capable pastors and preachers in the Southern Presbyterian Church—followed the troops and did whatever they could to tend to the spiritual needs of the army. In the years 1863 and 1864, especially, there was a great revival in the Confederate army, with some twelve thousand men making profession of faith in the latter year alone. In the course of the War, over one hundred thousand Confederate Soldiers made profession of faith—a fact that materially affected the spiritual condition of the South after the War; and several of these—James Power Smith (who served on the staff of Stonewall Jackson) and Givens Brown Strickler being two of the most prominent—entered the Presbyterian ministry and became leaders of the post-war church.

Interchurch Relations The Southern Assembly, even in the midst of the war, was much concerned to establish fellowship with other Reformed churches, and was able even to effect organic union with some of these. Union with the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church was solicited by the Southern Assembly in 1861, but the ARP declined to join. Some overtures were even made to the Cumberland Presbyterians; but the doctrinal differences were too great to be overcome. In 1863, a group of eleven churches in North and South Carolina that had been organized as the Independent Presbyterian Church were received into the Southern Church. And in 1864 the United Synod of the South—the body of New School churches that had left their Assembly in 1857 because of anti-slavery deliverances by that body—brought about 120 ministers, 190 churches, and some 12,000 communicants into the Southern Assembly. The latter action was not without some considerable controversy. Dr. Palmer and Dr. John Adger, two of the most prominent churchmen, vigorously opposed this move. R.L. Dabney, on the other hand, chaired the committee that proposed receiving the United Synod. This is especially interesting because Dabney would later prove an intractable opponent of membership in the Pan-Presbyterian Union, and was

62 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History stoutly opposed to any sort of relationship with the Northern Church. Dabney was concerned, however, that if the merger with the United Synod did not go through, there would be a New School seminary opened in Virginia. Besides which, the New School churches in the South had left the Old School Assembly after the division in 1837, not because they were theologically attuned to the New School views, but because they objected to what they considered high-handed methods on the part of the Old School. It is doubtful that the receiving of the United Synod brought any problems into the Southern church that were not already present in seed form.

Post-War Desolation and Isolation The defeat of the Southern Confederacy brought disaster to the South in every area of her life. The economy was in shambles. Many of the major towns and cities, and a not inconsiderable portion of the countryside, were in a state of utter desolation. Over 250,000 Southern soldiers were dead, to say nothing of the thousands more of civilians who died from disease, starvation, and the depredations of an enemy bent on destroying, not just an army, but the culture, and even the population of the South. The former slaves were suddenly placed in a position for which they were utterly unqualified and untrained. And it was all that many could do simply to try to hold body and soul together and deal with the further indignities visited upon them by the Yankee occupation. A horde of Northern criminals descended on the South to steal anything that might have escaped the destruction of war; and a few of the home-grown variety were quick to take advantage, as well. Churches had been destroyed and their congregations scattered. The work among the Negroes was hijacked by New England school marms and the Freedman’s Bureau, who labored to convince the former slaves that they needed to leave the white churches and start their own congregations. In this ‘put-upon’ state, there was little disposition among South- ern Presbyterians to end their independent organization and rejoin the church of their former connection. They were unable to resist any longer the military regime. But they were of no mind to rejoin those

April 2009 63 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal who had, before, during, and after the War, offered nothing but insults and condemnation. The only concession made was to rename the denomination, “The Presbyterian Church in the United States.”

Post-War Accessions Even in the midst of desolation and isolation, however, there were some bright spots, especially in connection with some accessions to the Southern Assembly arising directly out of its stated position on the spirituality of the church, and its contention for the supreme Crown Rights of King Jesus in the midst of the church. In 1866, after negotiations with the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church had failed to produce a merger with that body, the Alabama Presbytery of the ARP was received, on their motion, by the Synod of Alabama of the PCUS. In 1867, a group of three churches in Maryland, with six ministers and 576 communicants, which had been organized as the Presbytery of Patapsco, united with the Synod of Virginia. In 1869, the Kentucky Presbytery of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church was received. In that same year, a substantial portion of the Old School Synod of Kentucky, with 75 ministers, 137 churches, and over 13,000 communicants, was received into the Southern Assembly. And in 1874 another 67 ministers, 141 churches, and 8,000 communicants from the Old School Synod of Missouri found their way into the Southern Church. The accessions of these last mentioned two groups—those from Kentucky and Missouri—was the direct result of the abuses visited upon the churches and ministers of those Synods by the Northern Old School Assembly of which they had remained a part throughout the War. Many of the men from those Synods had opposed the Gardiner Spring resolutions; and they became increasingly disaffected as, year after year, the time of the Northern Assembly was taken up with political deliverances and measures intended to suppress what were regarded as disloyal elements in the Northern Church—particularly in the Synods of Kentucky and Missouri. In 1865, the Louisville Presbytery, under the leadership of Dr. Stuart Robinson, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church of that city

64 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History and a fierce advocate of the non-secular nature of the Church, drew up a “Declaration and Testimony” in protest of what they regarded as the Northern Assembly’s departure from the faith and practice ordained by Christ and from the true spiritual and divine nature of her calling and work. This “Declaration and Testimony” accused the Northern Church of effecting a virtual alliance with the state—a charge well borne out by the actions of that Assembly during the War. The 1866 Assembly of the Northern Church condemned this “Dec- laration and Testimony,” summoned the signers of it to answer to the 1867 Assembly, and denied to them a seat in any church court higher than the Session until the case was decided. The Assembly further ruled that any court receiving any of the signers of the “Declaration and Testimony” was ipso facto dissolved. When the attempt was made in the Synod of Kentucky to enforce these actions, three-fourths of Kentucky’s Presbyterians followed Dr. Robinson out of the Old School Northern Church. They were later received by the Southern Assembly, which proceeded to elect Dr. Robinson to the moderator’s chair. Essentially the same scenario was played out in Missouri, with essentially the same results. Many of the churches of that Synod for- sook the Old School Northern Church and moved into the Southern Presbyterian Church.

New Problems Unfortunately, the united front for sound doctrine and practice presented by Southern Presbyterians in the years immediately following the War began to unravel by the late 1870s. To be sure, there were many positive developments, including the revitalization of the work of the Southern Seminaries. Also, a revision of the Form of Government and Book of Discipline was a- dopted, which completed the canonization, if you will, of Thornwell’s views on the eldership and the decentralization of organization. The doctrine of the spiritual nature and function of the church was given a good deal of attention, and a committee was appointed to comb the records of the Assembly to find anything inconsistent with the clearly defined position of the church on this matter in order that such actions

April 2009 65 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal might be rescinded or corrected. But there were many in the Southern Church who, possibly because of the success of the church in these other areas, believed that it was time for a more open approach to ecumenical relations and that the Southern Assembly needed to begin concerning herself more with contacts in the larger church world. There had not been, of course, much in the way of opposition to the establishment of fraternal relations with other Presbyterian bodies in the South, nor even to merger with some of them. There had even been contacts with the Reformed Church in America. In 1874, however, an invitation to join the Presbyterian World Alliance stirred up a hornets’ nest of opposition, especially from South Carolina and the New Orleans area. H.M. Smith, Benjamin Palmer, and R.Q. Mallard, all from the Presbytery of New Orleans, were leaders in opposing the Alliance, as were John Adger of South Carolina, and R. L. Dabney of Virginia, who wrote extensively and vehemently against joining the organization. Support for joining the Alliance was also formidable, however, including such as Stuart Robinson and Moses Drury Hoge. The 1875 Assembly authorized a delegate to attend the organizational meeting of the Alliance; and in 1876, despite the strong opposition of some of the venerable fathers of the church, approval was given to membership. One of the reasons why Dabney and others who opposed membership in the Presbyterian World Alliance were so adamant was the fact that the Northern Assembly would be a part of this group. There was a long list of grievances against the Northern Church, and many of the Southern men were not of a mind to let go of these with a simple ‘never mind.’ In 1870, a delegation from the Northern Church—composed of men who were considered likely to receive a favorable hearing— appeared at the Southern Assembly, asking that a special committee be appointed to confer with a like committee of their Assembly to discuss the establishment of fraternal relations. At one point, it even appeared that the Southern Church might be poised to accept this proposal. But then Dr. Dabney arose to remind the brethren of the depredations that had been visited on the South, with the Old School Presbyterian Church in the North acting the part of cheerleader. A committee was

66 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History indeed appointed; but there were set out four issues that would have to be confronted for any movement to take place toward the establishment of fraternal relations. These were: 1) Removal of the difficulties with respect to political deliverances by church courts; 2) The union of the Northern New School Assembly with the Northern Old School Assembly; 3) The treatment of the Presbyterians in Kentucky; and, 4) The accusations against the Southern Church that were liberally sprinkled throughout the acts of the Old School Assembly. The men from the Northern Church realized there was little prospect of progress given the conditions imposed. The matter was brought up again in 1874, with Dr. Palmer chairing a committee to deal with the issue. There were no official instructions, this time, from the Assembly itself. But what the Southern men were looking for—an expression of regret for the injurious imputations heaped upon them by the Northern Assembly—the Northern men were indisposed to grant. Within a few years, however, attitudes began to soften. By 1882, there were four overtures to the Southern Assembly calling for closer relations between the two denominations. In the South, a generation had arisen that knew not the Gardiner Spring resolutions. Fraternal relations were approved, and, in 1883, there was an exchange of official delegates. It would take exactly one hundred years to accomplish organic union.

The Woodrow Case Beginning in 1884, and continuing for nearly a decade, the question of evolution produced in the Southern Church what would prove to be one of the most significant controversies of its separate history. The central figure of this controversy was Dr. James Woodrow (the uncle of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson), who in 1861 had been elected the first Perkins Professor of Natural Science at Columbia Seminary. The purpose of the establishment of this professorship was “to evince the harmony of science with the records of our faith, and to refute the objections of Infidel Naturalists.”14

14 Street, p. 95.

April 2009 67 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Dr. Woodrow was, by all accounts, a popular teacher, and he had served as Perkins Professor for some twenty years before rumors about his views began to be circulated. In order to set the record straight, the Professor, in 1884, gave a statement of his position in which he admitted that, while formerly he had opposed the hypothesis of the evolution of Adam’s body, he now believed it to be probably true. At issue was the meaning of the word “dust”; and, specifically, whether the dust from which Adam’s body was formed was organic or inor- ganic. Since the Bible is not explicit on this point, Woodrow felt free to interpret the word “dust” as meaning organic matter. Based on this, he posited that Adam’s body—but not Eve’s—probably had evolved, like the body of a horse. And with this, if you will pardon the expression, the race was on. Before it was over, Columbia Seminary had lost three of its four professors (including Dr. Woodrow), had experienced a fifty percent turnover in its board of directors, and was even forced to close for a year. The church papers were filled with articles about the controversy. There was the requisite “Declaration and Testimony” addressing this matter, signed by a number of ministers. Two assemblies of the Southern Church condemned the theory of evolution, and saw their action protested as a violation of the spiritual mission of the church. Woodrow’s chief adversary in the controversy was Dr. John Lafayette Girardeau, also a member of the Columbia faculty. The two met in a great debate during the 1884 meeting of the Synod of South Carolina. Woodrow spoke for five hours over two days in his defense. Girardeau was only marginally briefer.15 The two met again before the Synod of Georgia. After two years of controversy in the four Synods supporting Columbia Seminary, the matter came before the General Assembly,

15 One cannot imagine such a debate in any of the courts of the Presby- terian Church in America today. Three minutes into whatever one has to say, there is the ringing of a bell and the flashing of lights signaling the speaker’s time has elapsed—which is why there never has been, and never will be, anything of significance to come out of the courts of the PCA. There would be no place for men like Thornwell, Dabney, Girardeau, or, for that matter, even Woodrow.

68 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History first in 1886 by overture, and again in 1888 on complaint from Woodrow. On neither occasion did the Assembly leave any doubt as to where it stood. In 1886 the Assembly declared Woodrow’s views “repugnant to the word of God and to our Confession of Faith.”16 In 1888, the Assembly refused to uphold Woodrow’s complaint against the Synod of Georgia that had annulled the decision of the Presbytery of Augusta, which had found Woodrow not guilty of the charge of “teaching and formulating opinions and doctrines in conflict with the sacred Scriptures, as interpreted in our Standards.” In connection with this, the Assembly further stated its judgment “that Adam’s body was directly fashioned by Almighty God from the dust of the ground, without any natural animal parentage of any kind.”17 When Woodrow reported this to his Presbytery, however, the Presbytery declared that his ecclesiastical standing was in no respect impaired by this action. Indeed, Woodrow’s standing as a minister was never questioned at any level of the church’s jurisdiction—an ominous sign that the cult of personality over principle was already beginning to assert itself.

Decline and Disappearance By the end of the nineteenth century, most of the men who had been present at the founding of the Presbyterian Church in the Con- federate States of America had passed from the scene. Thornwell, of course, had died only months after the church was formed. Dabney and Girardeau died within a short time of one another in 1898. The last of the giants of that earlier era, B.M. Palmer, died as the result of a street car accident in New Orleans in 1902. The Southern Presbyterian Church would remain, basically, a conservative, evangelical church of the Reformed Tradition for another forty years or so. But the decline that would eventually lead to the disappearance of that body was already becoming evident in the very year that the old stalwarts Dabney and Girardeau died.

16 A Digest of the Acts and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States; Richmond, Virginia, Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1923, p. 493. 17 A Digest of the Acts, p. 687.

April 2009 69 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Watering Down the Confessional Testimony The Assembly, in 1898, gave a deliverance concerning what is meant by the phrase “the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture” in the second ordination vow taken by officebearers. The vow reads, in full: “Do you sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture?” The question is so clear as to admit of no misinterpretation. The person taking the vow agrees to “receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of this Church.” He agrees to this because these documents contain the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture. The 1898 Assembly declared, however, that “the use of the words ‘system of doctrine’ in terms of subscription precludes the idea of necessary acceptance of every statement in the Standards by the subscriber but involves the acceptance of so much as is vital to the system as a whole.”18 In 1934 the Assembly said that “While the candidate for ordination receives and adopts the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of the Church as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scripture, he does not affirm that each doctrine of the confession is an integral part of that system, or an essential doctrine of Scripture.”19 From that point, it was all downhill.

Changes in the Doctrinal Standards There were also a number of changes to the Standards themselves, especially in the period beginning in the late 1930s and continuing until the merger with the Northern Church in 1983. In 1939, for example, some changes were made in several paragraphs of the Confession of Faith that some might have taken as being purely cosmetic in nature. A close examination of these alterations, however, might lead one of suspicious tendencies to wonder if there was not more afoot.20

18 A Digest of the Acts, p. 213. 19 A Digest of the Acts, p. 213. 20 Dr. Morton Smith goes over these changes in some detail in his book How Is the Gold Become Dim, published in 1973 by the Steering Commit- tee for a Continuing Presbyterian Church, Faithful to the Scriptures and the

70 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History

In 1942 two additional chapters were added to the Confession. One of these was entitled “Of the Holy Spirit”; the other, “Of the Gospel.” Dr. J.B. Green, professor of Systematic Theology and Homiletics at Columbia Seminary in the period when these changes were enacted, wrote, specifically with reference to the chapter “Of the Gospel” (Chapter X):

The chapter on the Gospel is meant to make explicit what is only implicit in the Westminster Standards. The Westminster Assembly emphasized the love of God for the elect. This chapter was not designed to correct that emphasis but to supplement it. The fact of the love of God for all mankind underlies the whole statement of the Calvinistic creed. The revisers thought that this general love of God and His call to all men should have clear recognition.21

Dr. Morton Smith, in his assessment of these two chapters, notes that “The tone of these two chapters is certainly less Calvinistic than is the rest of the Confession of Faith.”22 This is certainly true; but we would go further and say that these sections seriously undermine the Calvinism of the Confession. What these two chapters did – especially the chapter “Of the Gospel”—was to gut the high Calvinism of the Confession and bring it into conformity, albeit confusingly, with the Arminian and modernistic views of those who wrote it and supported its inclusion in the Southern Church’s version of the Confession of Faith. In 1953 an attempt was made to change the language of chapter twenty-four of the Confession, “Of Marriage and Divorce.” The proposed changes—which would have added to the grounds for divorce and remarriage—though approved by the Assembly, were rejected by the Presbyteries. Another attempt at change was made in 1956. This time the advocates of looser standards for divorce and remarriage tried to garner support for their position by pointing out that there

Reformed Faith. Cf. pp. 49-51. 21 Green, James Benjamin, A Harmony of the Westminster Presbyterian Standards, Richmond, Virginia, John Knox Press, 1951, p. 71. 22 Smith, p. 53.

April 2009 71 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal were those who believe that if one were to base his judgment “on the total Biblical teaching on marriage, as well as on the specific words of Jesus and Paul,” he would have to conclude “that marriage is indis- soluble on any ground save death. In the light of this, the church can never bless the remarriage of divorced persons, so long as their first partners live.”23 Now, of course, this was pointed out, not because the authors of the statement were advocating that the Confession of Faith be changed in the direction of prohibiting remarriage after divorce, but because they were interested in promoting their contention that “the Bible does not offer specific ethical guidance on this point, and that the spirit and total teachings of our Lord, as well as the practical realities of life and the demands of Christian justice brand the above view as literalistic and legalistic.” Their conviction was “that the doctrine of Christian forgiveness implies that repentance for past failure, and the Christian intention to make a new union succeed, are justifiable grounds for the remarriage of divorced persons.”24 On this basis, then, they wanted to open the possibility of divorce and remarriage on the basis of grounds additional to the two set forth in the original chapter of the Confession. In 1959 the advocates of this change got their way when the PCUS basically opened up the possibility of divorce for any reason and the remarriage of divorced persons. The changes were regarded as so radical by some, however, that they declared to their Presbyteries that they were no longer in accord with the Confession as revised.25 In 1961 the Assembly refused to change the language having to do with reprobation (though that term is not used) in chapter three of the Confession. The only reason they did so, however, was that the revision, in their words, would “destroy the unity of the creed without resolving the problem.” In other words, the doctrine of reprobation is so woven into the fabric of the Confession that it cannot be ripped out without destroying the unity of the document. This did not mean, however, that the Assembly was going to let the doctrine stand, or that

23 Quoted from the Minutes of the 1956 General Assembly by Smith, How Is the Gold Become Dim, p. 54. 24 Smith, p. 55. 25 Smith, pp. 56-57.

72 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History the majority of the Assembly believed the language of the Confession to be correct. In the report of the committee that recommended that no change be made in the language of the Confession itself, was the following statement:

That the General Assembly declare that in its judgment the doctrine of ordination to everlasting death as formulated in the Confession is not an adequate statement of Christian faith, because it implies, regardless of the intention of the authors, an eternal negative decree; and that the doctrine as stated in the Confession, is not essential to Reformed theology as is indicated by its absence in this vigorous form in such authentic Reformed creeds as the Scot’s Confession of 1560, the Sec- ond Helvetic Confession, and the Heidelberg Catechism.26

One of the members of the committee that brought this recom- mendation, which was adopted by the Assembly, was Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr., who was a professor at Columbia Seminary when this writer was a student there and heard Professor Guthrie characterize the Canons of Dordt as “demonic.” This will, perhaps, give some sense of how concerned the committee was with “authentic Reformed creeds.” In 1969 the previous actions of the Assemblies of 1886, 1888, 1889, and 1924—all of which affirmed that God created man directly and not through evolutionary process—were declared to be in error, and no longer representative of the mind of the church. “Neither Scripture, nor our Confession of Faith, nor our catechisms,” the As- sembly declared, “teach the Creation of man by the direct and immediate acts of God so as to exclude the possibility of evolution as a scientific theory.” Not only was James Woodrow vindicated, but the Assembly went much further than even he would have been willing to go in embracing evolution.27

26 Minutes of the One-Hundred-First General Assembly of the Presby- terian Church in the United States, p. 139. The entire report begins on page 132, and continues through page 139. 27 Smith, pp. 58, 59ff.

April 2009 73 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Conclusion In 1964, changes were made in the Book of Church Order to allow women to occupy all offices in the Church. Some would contend, however, that the denomination had already been thoroughly feminized long before this official action had been taken. In 1971, in a paper entitled “The Person and work of the Holy Spirit, with Special Reference to the ‘Baptism of the Holy Spirit,’” the Assembly declared that baptism with the Holy Spirit is not necessarily to be identified with conversion, but may be a later experience of God, “whereby believers are enabled to give expression to the Gospel through extraordinary praise, powerful witness, and boldness of action.” They also allowed as how the baptism of the Spirit may be manifested in such things as speaking in tongues and prophecy. Thus, the Church of Thornwell, Dabney, and Palmer was rendered not only an Arminian, but a Pentecostal body, distinct from the Assemblies of God only in that its membership dressed better and drove nicer cars, and in that its preachers, unlike those of the Assemblies of God, denied most of the other cardinal doctrines of the Faith. The Southern Presbyterian Church started her history as a strong contender for Reformed Truth and Presbyterian Order. Those distinctives were surrendered several years before her final demise. She is now as dead as the men who founded her. There has been, thus far, no worthy successor. l

BIBLIOGRAPHY A Collection of the Acts, Deliverances, and Testimonies of the Su- preme Judicatory of the Presbyterian Church from its Origin in America to the Present Time, Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1856.

Clarke, Erskine, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690-1990, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1996.

74 Vol. 42, No. 2 Southern Presbyterian History

Digest of the Acts and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, Richmond, Virginia: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1911.

Digest of the Acts and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, Richmond, Virginia: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1923.

Digest of the Acts and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, Atlanta, Georgia: Of- fice of the General Assembly, 1966.

Green, James Benjamin, A Harmony of the Westminster Presbyterian Standards, Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1951.

Hays, George P., Presbyterians: A Popular Narrative of Their Origin, Progress, Doctrines, and Achievements, New York: J.A. Hill & Co., 1892.

Howe, George, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, Columbia: Duffie & Chapman, 1870.

Johnson, Thomas Cary, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Morgan Palmer, Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987.

_____. Virginia Presbyterianism and Religious Liberty in Colonial and Revolutionary Times, Richmond, Virginia: The Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1907.

Minutes of the One-Hundred-First General Assembly of the Presby- terian Church in the United States, 1961.

Palmer, Benjamin Morgan, The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell, Richmond, Virginia: Whittet & Shepperson, 1875.

April 2009 75 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Smith, H. Shelton, Handy, Robert T. and Loetscher, Lefferts A., American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with Repre- sentative Documents, 1607-1820, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960.

Smith, Morton Howison, How is the Gold Become Dim, published by the Steering Committee for a Continuing Presbyterian Church, Faith- ful to the Scriptures and the Reformed Faith, Jackson, Mississippi: Premier Printing Company, 1973.

_____. Studies in Southern Presbyterian Theology, Jackson, Missis- sippi: Presbyterian Reformation Society, and Amsterdam: Drukkerij en Uitgeverij Jacob Van Campen, 1962.

Street, T. Watson, The Story of Southern Presbyterians, Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1960

Thompson, Ernest Trice, Presbyterians in the South, Volume One, 1607-1861, Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1963.

_____. Presbyterians in the South, Volume Two, 1861-1890, Rich- mond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1973.

76 Vol. 42, No. 2 Guido De Brès Letter

Historical Introduction to Guido de Brès’ Letter to King Philip II of Spain Russell J. Dykstra

Behind the following letter is a story of spiritual courage and faithfulness under the real threat of death for the sake of the Reformed faith. It is the letter written by the Reformed preacher Guido de Brès to the Roman Catholic King Philip II of Spain in 1561. Philip was the sworn enemy of the Reformation in the Lowlands. The writer was a Reformed preacher with much God-given ability and commitment to the faith. Guido de Brès was born in Mons, a city in the southern French- speaking region of the Lowlands, located in the present-day Belgian province of Hainaut. He was raised Roman Catholic, but before the age of twenty-five he became Protestant. The Lowlands, or Netherland provinces, were ruled by Emperor Charles V, and since the early 1520s he persecuted the Protestants in the Netherlands, putting many of them to death. To escape persecution, de Brès moved to England in 1548 and joined a Huguenot refugee church in London. There de Brès met and studied under continental reformers such as John à Lasco, Martin Bucer, and Peter Dathenus. By 1552 the persecution became less severe in the Netherlands, allowing de Brès to return to his native land, where he became a pastor. There he wrote his first book,The Staff of the Christian Faith, an exposition of the faith over against the errors of Rome. Meanwhile, Emperor Charles had decided to abdicate his throne in favor of his son, Philip. In 1556, Philip took the throne of Spain, and became ruler also of the Netherlands. A devoted Roman Catholic like his father, Philip was determined to stamp out the Reformation in the Netherlands. He wrote to the pope in 1566, “Rather than suffer the least damage to religion and the service of God, I would lose all my states and a hundred lives, if I had them: for I do not propose to be ruler of heretics.”

April 2009 77 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Philip made good on his word. He impressed upon the pope the need for more bishops in the Netherlands. Fourteen more were added, beginning in 1559. He appointed his half sister, Margaret of Parma, regent in the Netherlands with the duty to exterminate the Protestants. She was aided by Cardinal Granvelle and the dreaded Inquisition. Thousands of Lowlanders were imprisoned, tortured, and killed for their faith. In response to this increased danger, de Brès led his flock to Frank- furt, Germany. Because he recognized the importance for a preacher to know Greek and Hebrew, he began studying under Theodore Beza in Lausanne. He studied for almost two years in the Reformed Academy in Lausanne, and when Beza went to Geneva, de Brès followed him and studied there for another year. Returning to the Netherlands in 1559, he became a pastor to a number of Walloon churches (French-speaking people in what is today Belgium) before settling in Doornik. There he married Cath- erine Ramon, and he began the work of writing a confession of faith for the churches in the region. Due to the continuing persecution, de Brès was forced to work very much undercover, and for a time his congregation maintained a low profile and worshiped undisturbed by the authorities. This changed in 1559, when some of the more radical members decided it was necessary to make known their growing presence in Doornik. This led to direct persecution of the believers in Doornik. As was often the case, the Protestants were accused of many crimes, including insurrection against the government. Under these circumstances, de Brès finished his confession of faith in 1561. It is quite possible that other ministers assisted him, but the identity of the men and the extent of the help cannot be ascertained. In November of 1561, he wrote a letter to King Philip, who was lodg- ing in a castle in Doornik. Shortly thereafter a bundle containing the confession of faith and this letter was cast over the gates of the castle. This unsigned, handwritten letter de Brès wrote on behalf of the persecuted Protestants. The letter is a powerful and poignant petition for relief from persecution. It informed the king that they would prefer to speak with him face to face, but the unjust persecution prevented

78 Vol. 42, No. 2 Guido De Brès Letter this. It declared that, on the one hand, they were willing and ready to obey the king in all lawful matters. But it added this heartfelt confession, that rather than to deny the truth of God’s Word, they would, as the letter stated, “offer our backs to stripes, our tongues to knives, the mouth to the muzzle, and the whole body to the fire.” And they presented to the king their confession of faith, adding, “being ever ready and willing, if it be necessary, to seal it with our own blood.” These were no empty statements. All over the Netherlands believers were being tortured and put to death. In fact, less than six years later, de Brès and fellow minister de la Grange were arrested in Valenciennes, and shortly thereafter publicly hanged. Guido de Brès, only 44 years old, left a beloved wife and several children. The confession of faith was adopted by the Reformed churches as early as 1566 in the provincial synod of Antwerp. Eventually, the great synod of Dordrecht adopted it in 1619, and it remains one of the three major creeds for Reformed churches in the Netherlands and around the world today. Our attention is focused on the letter written to introduce the confession of faith to Philip II and the other magistrates. This letter was originally written in French in 1561. Both the confession and the letter were translated into Dutch and printed in 1562. To date, an English translation of this letter has not been readily available. Marvin Kamps, a member of the Protestant Reformed Churches, took it upon himself to translate this letter from the Dutch. The source of the Dutch edition is J. N. Bakkuigen van den Brink, De Nederlansche Belijdenis Geschriften, (Amsterdam: Uitgeversmaat- schappij, Holland, 1940). We are grateful for the time and work that Mr. Kamps put into this translation. This is a significant contribution to the body of Dutch documents translated into English. It is of value to believers interested in the history and doctrines of the Reformed churches in the Netherlands. In both the French and the Dutch printed editions, de Brès’ letter is introduced with a poem. The documents give no indication of the poem’s writer. The Reformers who had this letter and poem printed in the 1560s recognized that poetry can stir powerful emotions more effectively than prose. For the same reason, we also desired to retain

April 2009 79 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal the poem. Thus, after Marvin Kamps translated the Dutch poem into English prose, we asked Sue Looyenga, a teacher in Covenant Chris- tian High School in Grand Rapids, MI, to set the prose into poetic verse. This she did, masterfully capturing the feeling that the original poem intended. We thank her also for this contribution.

Guido De Brès’ Letter to Philip II of Spain Appended to the Belgic Confession,

translated by Marvin Kamps

Through common agreement composed by believers that are scattered about throughout the Netherlands, who desire to live according to the sovereignty of The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Be ready always to give an an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you. I Peter 3

Published in the year of the Lord Jesus Christ: 1562.

E’er sentence is pronounced by any man, Whether in civil or in criminal case, Certainly Judges wish to understand That issue’s source on which they judgment place.

80 Vol. 42, No. 2 Guido De Brès Letter

This being true, a judge in this position Would grant both parties of examination An equal hearing, and by this audition, Base his decision—whether right or wrong—upon investigation. We, then, Your Majesty, as castaways Forbidden by our enemies e’en public speech, Call on th’ abounding goodness that men praise In thee, and private audience beseech. When you, who Judges are, judge only as flesh is inclined— With prejudice—surely wisdom to you is denied. Only in one way can we all true justice find: That you consider our own confession e’er you once decide. For of a certainty you shall in this way see That unjust condemnation oft’ has fallen on such men as we.

From the Believers that dwell in the Netherlands, Who desire to live according to the Reformation of The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, To the invincible King Philip, her ruling Lord:

If it were granted to us, O most gracious Lord,1 to present ourselves before your Majesty, in order that we may demonstrate our innocence concerning the crimes with which we are charged, and to demonstrate the righteousness of our cause: we would not seek this secret means in order to make known to you the bitter laments of your people by means of a silent petition or a written confession. We do so in this manner only because our enemies have filled your ears with so many false complaints and reports that we were not only prevented to appear before your face personally, but also chased out of your lands, murdered, and burned in whatever place we were found. At the very least, most gracious Lord, bestow to us in the name of God the privi- lege that no man may deny even beasts, namely, to permit our cries of complaint to reach your ears as it were from afar; so that, if having heard us, Your Majesty should judge us guilty, let the fires then be

1 In the French copy of the letter King Philip is addressed throughout “Sire,” but the Dutch consistently has, “genadichste Heere.”

April 2009 81 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal increased in number and let the pains and torments be multiplied in thy kingdom. On the contrary, if our innocence is revealed to you, let our innocence be recognized as a support and a refuge against the violence of our enemies. For alas, most gracious Lord, if men need only charge others with evil and thereby every means of protection be denied the accused, who will be found righteous? Whose innocence among all the people will be established? We are, they say, disobedient insurrectionists desiring nothing other than to destroy all political and civil rule and to introduce into the world confusion and disorder. Besides they claim that we desire not only to liberate ourselves from your rule and power but also to rip the scepter from your hands. O the crimes alleged, which are unworthy of our confession, unworthy of a Christian man, unworthy of the common name of humanity; worthy only that the ancient proverb of the tyrants be presented anew: “The Christians to the beasts.” However, it is not enough merely to accuse; everything lies in the proof. The prophets, the apostles, and even those of the early churches of Jesus Christ were troubled, yea, according to the external viewpoint and carnal judgment of men, they were oppressed with similar slanders. But even as they had openly testified and protested in their time, so also do we protest and testify now before God and His angels that we desire nothing higher than to live according to the purity of our consciences in obedience under the authorities, to serve God and to reform ourselves according to His Word and holy commandments. Besides these hidden testimonies of our consciences, those who hold office and pass sentence and judgment in legal proceedings would be good witnesses that they never observed anything in us that leaned towards disobedience, nor did they discover in us the resolve in any way to militate against your Majesty, nor did they find anything that would disturb the common peace. Rather, they found that in our communal assemblies we pray for the kings and princes of the earth and in particular for you, O most gracious Lord, and for those whom you have authorized in the regime and ruling offices of the regions and countries of your domain. For we have been taught not only by God’s Word but also through the constant instruction of our preachers that the kings, princes, and authorities are appointed

82 Vol. 42, No. 2 Guido De Brès Letter by the ordinance of God. Besides, we have been taught that he that resists the magistrates resists the ordinance of God and will receive damnation. We acknowledge and maintain that by the eternal wisdom of God the kings rule and the princes determine justice. Briefly stated, we believe that they have their office not through injustice2 or despotism, but by God’s own appointment. In order to demonstrate that this is not merely the word of our lips but that it is a conviction most deeply impressed and imprinted upon our hearts, we ask: who has ever been found among us who has refused you, most gracious Lord, the tribute or tax required of him? On the contrary, obedience to pay was as quickly granted as the command was given. What cache of weapons, what conspiracy was ever uncovered, even when we had been subjected to such cruel pains and torment by those who have clothed themselves in your name and power to commit every cruelty against us? These torments were so excruciating that it was enough to vex the patience of the most benevolent and meekest persons and to change their dispositions to wrath and despair. However, we thank our God that the blood of our brothers that was shed for our cause—or rather, for the cause of Jesus Christ and the witness to the truth—cries out on our behalf. For truly all the banishments, imprisonments, racks, tortures, and other innumerable oppressions testify clearly that our desire and conviction is not carnal, since, according to the flesh, we could have had it much more comfortable if we had not taken a stand for these doctrines. However, since we had the fear of God before our eyes and thus dreading the threat of Jesus Christ, who says that He will deny us before God His Father, should we deny Him before men: we offer our backs to the whip’s lash, our tongues to the knives, the mouth to the muzzle, and the whole body to the flames. For we know that whoever will follow Christ must take up his cross and deny himself. Never would a well-disciplined soul, that is, one who is not spiritually blind or robbed of his senses, contemplate the upheaval of forsaking one’s land, one’s relatives, and one’s friends, in order to be able to live in peace and tranquility. Never would a spiritually sound person purpose to suffer for the gospel’s sake by seeking to remove the king’s crown

2 Or wrongdoing. The French has usurpation.

April 2009 83 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal or by resolving to oppose him by means of deceit, for in the gospel we read: give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Rather these believers, while offering and abandoning their bodies and their goods to the King, humbly supplicate his Majesty that it may be granted them to render obedience to God in what He requires. For we have not the right nor may we refuse to obey Him, because He hath made us and purchased us for Himself through the payment of the most dear price of infinite worth. It is also not necessary that you should feel obligated to listen to the views of our enemies. They grievously abuse your goodness and patience by claiming that we do not openly oppose you as King only because we are so few in number. They allege also that each one of us in his heart is disobedient and rebellious, only waiting for the majority of the people to bring his fanaticism into action causing him to pounce violently upon you. For let them twist and pervert the facts as much as they will, we assure you, most gracious Lord, that in your Netherlands there are more than one hundred thousand men maintaining and following the religion, the confession of which we now deliver to you. Nevertheless, in none of these persons was ever seen any preparation for revolt. Indeed, never a word was heard from these persons that would lead to insurrection. We have spoken, most gracious Lord, of the great number of our brothers not to cause your minor officers and servants any fear or terror, but rather to refute the slanders of those who through lies could make those who do not envy us to do so.3 Besides, we have thus spoken to move you to pity. For sadly, if you stretch forth your powerful hand to wash it in the blood of so many people, before God, what devastation will it work in your subjects, what wounds in your people, what weeping, what lament, what groaning by the women, by the children, and by family and friends? Who shall be able to behold with eyes dry and not bathed in tears, many honorable citizens, loved by all and hated by none, delivered over to dark and dreadful imprisonments, endure the oppressions and tortures ending in the most shameful torments and death more cruel and barbaric than were ever invented by the heathen and by ungodly tyrants? while their wives, if they are

3 French: …make us odious.

84 Vol. 42, No. 2 Guido De Brès Letter able to flee, wander about in foreign countries, begging for bread from door to door with their little children clinging to their neck? O most gracious Lord, may it not be that posterity describes your reign as bloody and cruel. May no one say that the honor of your ancestors, the greatness of your father, and your own virtues and piety were darkened by a cruelty, a cruelty I say, natural to the beasts but unworthy of man. It would be a cruelty contradicting what a prince and ruler should be, whose greatness and true piety are expressed especially by kindness and compassion—the genuine marks of distinction between a true king and a tyrant. As regards the persecution that we endure not only as enemies of your crown and of the common good, but also as enemies of God and of His church, we humbly petition you carefully to judge this matter according to our confession of faith that we present to you being ever ready and willing, if it be necessary, to seal it with our own blood. Through this confession, as we hope, you will acknowledge that we are unjustly vilified as schismatics or as disturbers of the unity of society, as disobedient and as heretics, since we are committed to and confess not only the most fundamental points of the Christian faith that are contained in the symbols of the common faith but also the whole doctrine revealed by Jesus Christ for a life of righteousness and salvation. This doctrine was preached by the evangelists and apostles, sealed in the blood of so many martyrs, preserved purely and wholly in the early church; until it was corrupted through the ignorance, greed, and the lust for praise of the preachers, through human discoveries and human institutions contrary to the purity of the gospel. Our opponents shamelessly deny that this gospel is the power of God unto salvation and reject all those who believe it, when they condemn and murder us because we do not receive what is not found in it. Nor are they innocent of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit when they assert that the entire treasure of the wisdom of God and the means abundantly sufficient to our salvation are not contained and present in the Old and New Testaments. Rather they claim that their inventions are necessary; that we are accursed and not worthy of the natural fellowship among men, but only worthy to be put to death in the body and pressed down in our souls into the abyss of hell. While

April 2009 85 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal ignoring the truth, our enemies hold their inventions to be of equal or even of higher esteem and worth than the gospel. The weakness of our flesh staggers before these words, terrified by the threats of those who have the power to reduce our bodies to ashes. But on the other hand, we hear what the apostle says: “Though an angel should descend from heaven and preach to us something other than that gospel you have received, he is accursed.” We hear Saint John, who concludes his prophecy with these words: “For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book; if anyone adds to them, God will lay upon him the plagues that are written in this book.” Briefly stated, we see that we are commanded to follow God’s Word alone and not whatever seems right to us; for we are forbidden to add to or to detract from the holy commandments of the great God. Jesus Christ tells us that He has given to us all that which He had heard from His Father; and if He were silent (because of the weakness of the apostles) about something that He had promised to reveal to us through the Holy Spirit whom He would send to us, we are assured (because He is the Truth itself) that He has kept that promise. The promised mysteries were made known and are contained in the Gospels and the writings of the apostles, after the aforesaid promise was made and the Holy Spirit was poured out. It appears by this fact, that those individuals misuse this passage of Scripture, who by this word “mysteries” understand, (something the apostles did not and could not endure) their own ceremonies and useless superstitions, contrary to God’s Word. We merely present it, even though their errors would be easy to demonstrate by means of the testimony of Scripture (but we are ad- monished to use the means and brevity in a letter that is appropriate), for we fear to be bothersome to your Majesty. We humbly petition you, in the very Name of the one who has established and preserved you in your kingdom, that you do not permit those in authority who are overcome by greed, lust for honor and praise of men, and other evil inclinations, to use your arm, authority, and power to satisfy their lusts, satiating and filling it with the blood of your subjects who are praised for their genuine zeal for the fear of God and His service. For they would persecute us on the grounds of the evil charge that we are

86 Vol. 42, No. 2 Guido De Brès Letter guilty of insurrection, desertion, and other offenses, with which they inflame you against us. However, most gracious Lord, consider, has it not always been true that the world hated the light and opposed the truth; and that he who speaks this word of truth faithfully is considered guilty of insurrection, because people incite others to oppose him? On the contrary, one must attribute the tumult and offense to the one who has been the implacable enemy of God and men, namely the Devil, who, not willing to lose his kingdom, which exists in idolatry, the false worship of God, whoredom, and other innumerable errors forbidden by the gospel, raises tumult and opposition everywhere in order to resist the progress of the gospel. Add to that the ingratitude of the world, which, instead of thankfully receiving the Word of her Master, her shepherds, and her God, causes her to oppose the same because of, among other reasons that could be mentioned, the long time that she has lived in unfaithfulness and error. The world of unbelief willfully resists, through prescription of the spirit of the ages, Him who has made the world and the ages and for which all thanks is due. It belongs to you, most gracious Lord, it belongs to you to have knowledge of these matters in order that you may oppose the errors, no matter how intractable, being deeply rooted in the ages. It belongs to you to protect the innocence of those who have been more oppressed than heard in their just cause. In this manner, the Lord will bless and preserve you. The Lord lift up His face and cause it to shine upon you, protect and maintain you in all prosperity. Amen.

SOME TEXTS

Of the New Testament, that admonish every believer to confess his faith before the world.

Matthew 10 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.

April 2009 87 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Mark 8 and Luke 9 Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

I Peter 3 Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.

Romans 10 With the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

II Timothy 2 If we deny him, he also will deny us.

88 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology Process Theology: Philosophical Idolatry

Daniel Holstege

Introduction Process theology is philosophical idolatry. There may be no equivocation concerning this. This must be the conviction of everyone who believes in the truth of biblical Christianity. This must certainly be the conviction of every Reformed believer. We may not take a purely intellectual or indifferent attitude toward process theology. It is idolatry, which sets up a different God than the God of Scripture. When process theology is weighed in the scale of biblical truth, it is found entirely wanting and therefore must be entirely rejected. Process theology has dreamed up a God of its own making, an idol god that is no God at all. The god of process theology is merely a necessary component of a complex philosophy. We will see that he is weak and changeable; he is not all-powerful but shares his power with the world. It is difficult to imagine how such a God could be worshiped. The process god is more like an equal to the world than its sovereign Creator. Therefore process theology must be rejected as an idolatrous philosophy and damnable false religion. Process theology rejects all the traditional, biblical teachings concerning God. To such an extent is this true, that when process theologians use the word “God” they mean something entirely different from what the traditional believer means. Nothing can be taken for granted. Every idea you have of God must be thrown out. God is not transcendent. He did not create all things out of nothing. He is not outside time. He is not outside space. He is not all-powerful. He is not independent and self-sufficient. Rather, God is in the world and was forever with the world. He becomes, grows, and develops with that world. He suffers with that world and experiences joy with it. These experiences contribute to his very life and being. They make him who he is. Thus, the god of process theology is not so different from the idol gods of the ancient pagans. Like them, he too lives

April 2009 89 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal inside the universe and is affected by it. Like them, he too does not have sovereign control over the universe. Christians today must reject process theology as a modern form of pagan idolatry. It is idolatry clothed in modern philosophical garb. Let us not be enticed by Satan’s new approach. Let us recognize process theology for the wickedness that it is. In this paper I will first explain what process theology is and then move on to give my evaluation and criticism. I will first briefly treat the historical origins of process theology and look at the philosophy from whence it came. Then I will discuss the main teachings of process theology itself, after which I will show why it must be rejected. In this way I will demonstrate that process theology is a modern form of philosophical idolatry.

Historical Origins Spiritual origin The historical origin of process theology is ultimately the unbelieving heart of man. The heart of unbelieving man is the source from which all false theologies and religions arise. This is according to the principle laid down in Romans 1:

When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image…who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator (vv. 21-25).

In Paul’s day this referred to the pagan idolatry of Greece and Rome. The Greeks and Romans dreamed up myriads of gods from their own vain imaginations. They looked at creatures such as the ocean, sky, and forest and imagined that these must be embodiments of deity. They looked at themselves and created gods after their own image. And then they worshiped these creatures rather than the Creator. This may seem primitive and silly, but this is exactly what process theology has done. The God of process theology arises from the same unbelieving imagination, albeit in a modern mind. Like their ancient predecessors,

90 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology process theologians have looked at the creation and imagined their god from what they found there. As Norman Geisler has remarked, process theology “is a classic error of creating God in man’s own image, which image is in turn extrapolated from an organistic model of nature.”1 The god of process theology has not created the world, but he is in the world. This too is creature worship.

Alfred North Whitehead More specifically, the historical origin of process theology is the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947).2 Whitehead was an English philosopher who began his career studying mathematics and the philosophy of nature. He was an agnostic with regard to belief in God. But in 1924 he came to Harvard University in the United States and began to develop his “philosophy of organism,” which is now known as “process philosophy.” This led him to assert the existence of God as a necessary component of his organismic view of the world and reality. The greatest of his works in this regard is Process and Reality (1929), which is his “magnum opus, central to an understanding of Whitehead’s mature metaphysical position.”3 In this dense and complicated work, Whitehead lays out his view of reality as an ongoing process of becoming. His theological views come out here as well. God is part of the ongoing process of reality, according to Whitehead. In his mind, God may not be “treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is

1 Norman Geisler, “Process Theology,” Tensions in Contemporary Theology, Ed. Stanley N. Gundry and Alan F. Johnson (Chicago: Moody Press, 1976), p. 280. 2 David Ray Griffin, “Process Theology,”The Encyclopedia of Christi- anity, Ed. Erwin Fahlbusch, et. al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), pp. 364-369. 3 Donald W. Sherburne, ed., A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 1. Most of my references to Whitehead’s thought will be from this book. Whitehead’s Process and Reality is highly dense, unorganized, and difficult to understand. But this book by Sherburne intends to give access to Process and Reality by organizing the main topics and summarizing them using Whitehead’s own words.

April 2009 91 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal their chief exemplification.”4 God, too, is subject to metaphysical principles. In fact, he exemplifies them more than any other. But Whitehead’s philosophy was largely ignored for more than three decades after he began to formulate it.5 The reason for this was that philosophy at that time was anti-metaphysical and materialistic, whereas Whitehead’s philosophy was metaphysical, God-affirming, and organismic. At any rate, in the 1960s “a spate of books on White- head’s philosophy inaugurated a period of greater interest.”6 The journal Process Studies and the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California were born in the early 1970s to promote the Whiteheadian philosophy. But the great influence of Whitehead’s philosophy on theology was due to a man named Charles Hartshorne.

Charles Hartshorne Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) was the son of a Pennsylvania minister who studied under Alfred Whitehead at Harvard in the 1920s. Although the son of a Christian minister, Hartshorne was taught to place his trust in philosophical reasoning over biblical revelation. He pursued philosophy in the halls of American academia and became a distinguished thinker in the Whiteheadian school.7 According to Alan Gragg, Hartshorne’s philosophy is “strikingly similar and most profoundly indebted to that of A. N. Whitehead.” Gragg goes on to remark that “it is well-nigh impossible to imagine Hartshorne apart from Whitehead.”8 The clearest evidence of Hartshorne’s dependence on Whitehead is his unreserved acceptance of the idea that the universe is essentially becoming. Hartshorne agrees with Whitehead that even God “is ceaselessly changing in a dynamic process of creative advance that will never end.”9 It was Hartshorne who focused especially on the theological side

4 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 179. 5 Griffin, “Process Theology,” Encyclopedia, p. 363. 6 Griffin, “Process Theology,” Encyclopedia, p. 363. 7 Alan Gragg, Makers of the Modern Theological Mind: Charles Hart- shorne, Ed. Bob E. Patterson (Waco, TX: Word Books, Publisher, 1973), p. 11ff. 8 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 13. 9 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 16. 92 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology of process philosophy and thereby developed what has come to be called “process theology.” Because of his special attention on God, Gragg states that Hartshorne “deserves the title ‘the God-intoxicated philosopher’ as much as any thinker since Spinoza…. In fact, Hart- shorne explicitly states that, on the most fundamental level, the question of God is the sole question of metaphysics.”10 For that reason, Hartshorne’s greatest influence has been on American theology, not philosophy. Gragg states that Hartshorne’s process theology is “one of the most creative and viable options on the American scene.”11 Indeed, process theology has found great acceptance in the spheres of liberal Christianity. Some prominent contemporary process theologians include John B. Cobb, Jr., David Ray Griffin, and Norman Pittenger, among others.12

Process Philosophy Since process theology is rooted firmly in process philosophy, we must first have a general understanding of the philosophy. Process philosophy is a metaphysical philosophy. It is an attempt to explain the most fundamental realities of the universe, the realities that form the basis for all things. In this regard it is a minority in twentieth century philosophy, because metaphysics was largely given up as a hopeless endeavor. Nevertheless, Alfred Whitehead was convinced of the possibility of metaphysics. In his philosophy he attempted to explain the basic realities of the universe. He called it the “philosophy of organism.” But the fundamental notion of his philosophy was process. Whitehead taught that the most basic units of reality are not static, unchanging particles, but instances of experience. These occa-

10 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 73. 11 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 14. Alan Gragg wrote this book in the early 1970s, when process thought was beginning to gain a greater following. The theological and religious side of it was also becoming more influential, so that Gragg could remark that it was one of the most “viable options on the American scene.” 12 Interestingly, process theology has been popular among a number of Jewish Rabbi theologians, especially those of “Conservative Judaism,” a modern form of Judaism with varying ideas about the nature of God.

April 2009 93 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal sions of experience are the most basic building blocks of the universe. Thus Whitehead’s system is a philosophy of process. It is a philosophy that views all of reality as fundamentally in a process of becoming. Whitehead termed these basic units of reality “actual entities.” He describes them in Process and Reality as follows,

‘Actual entities’—also termed ‘actual occasions’—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real…. God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space…and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.13

The term “actual entity” means “most basic thing” or “most real thing.” The other terms Whitehead uses, such as “occasion,” “throb of experience,” “process of feeling,” and others, point out that these most basic things are not pieces of matter, but instances of experience. They are occasions, events, experiences. But even though actual entities are the most basic things in the universe, they are still “complex and interdependent” according to Whitehead. These “occasions” are complex, inasmuch as they are constituted by their many “feelings” or “prehensions.”14 Each actual entity appropriates data from other actual entities, which data becomes part of the “real internal constitution” of the actual entity.15 In this way, the most basic things in the universe are instances of becoming. They are instances in which information is absorbed from one entity into another. They are individual occasions that are part of the universal, never-ending process of becoming. If actual entities are the most basic things in the universe, what

13 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmol- ogy, Corrected Edition (New York: The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., 1978), p. 18. 14 A “feeling” or “prehension” is a “process of appropriation of a particular element.” They are “activities” which make up each actual entity. They may be “positive,” in that they appropriate something from another actual entity; or “negative,” in that they exclude something from another actual entity. The activity of prehension is what makes an actual entity what it is: it is a prehending thing (Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 8). 15 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 9.

94 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology are the things we experience in our everyday life? Whitehead calls these things “nexūs” (plural of “nexus”) or “societies.”16 A nexus is a “macrocosmic entity” made up of many “microcosmic” actual entities. Nexūs are things like men, trees, houses, and all objects in our everyday experience. A nexus is a group of actual entities that have something in common, some “particular fact of togetherness.”17 Most nexūs are also “societies.” A society is a nexus with “social order.” The actual entities of a society perpetuate their togetherness so that, for example, a tree remains a tree from moment to moment. But this area of process philosophy is not our focus. One fairly important concept to understand is Whitehead’s notion of “satisfaction.” As we have seen, actual entities are instances of experience and becoming. Satisfaction, then, is the culmination of the experience, attained when the actual entity reaches the point to which it aims. It is “the attainment of the private ideal which is the final cause” of the becoming. “The attainment of a peculiar definite- ness is the final cause which animates a particular process; and its attainment halts its process.”18 In other words, an actual entity has a certain goal that it wants to reach. That goal urges it into action, so to speak, until it is achieved. Once an actual entity is “satisfied,” its process of becoming ends, making it “objectively immortal” and the data for a future process of becoming.19 In Whitehead’s philosophy, God contributes the “subjective aim” of every process of becoming. “Subjective aim concerns the direction to be taken” in the process of becoming. Every process of becoming “faces the question of what sort of entity it will make itself.”20 God contributes the subjective aim in order to influence each process to go a certain way. God tries to accomplish what he desires for his own maximum satisfaction:

God offers for each actual entity, as its subjective aim, a vision of what that entity might become. This subjective aim constitutes the ideal for

16 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 230. 17 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 20. 18 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 70. 19 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 14. 20 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 28.

April 2009 95 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

growth on the part of each actual entity that would result in maximum ordered complexity in the world were it realized in fact—this is God’s mode of operation in the world, designed to produce the kind of world that, physically prehended by his consequent nature, would result in maximum intensity of satisfaction for him.21

According to this view, God does not compel or coerce actual entities to become what he wants, but he “lures” them in the direction he wants. He does not sovereignly control all things, but he exerts a certain influence on them. As Griffin puts it, “The divine power…is necessarily persuasive; it could not be coercive in the sense of uni- laterally determining what happens in the world…. God’s power is misconstrued if it is thought to be all-controlling power.”22 God puts the bait out there, so to speak, to entice actual entities. This is his mode of working in the world. In this way he tries to achieve a universe that would be the “maximum intensity of satisfaction for him.” He seeks the greatest “intensity of harmonious feeling in the world.” 23

Process Theology It is not really possible to draw a sharp distinction between process philosophy and process theology, because they are basically the same. The best way to describe the relationship is probably to say that process theology is based on the philosophy. But really process theology is just an elucidation of the theological side of the philosophy. By “process theology” I refer to the historical, theological movement given impetus by Charles Hartshorne in the mid-twentieth century. We turn now to the main tenets of this philosophical theology.

Naturalistic theism Process theology teaches “naturalistic theism” as opposed to “supernatural theism.” In agreement with Alfred N. Whitehead, process theologians insist that the metaphysical principles involved in this world apply also to God.

21 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 244. 22 Griffin, “Process Theology,” Encyclopedia, pp. 365-366. 23 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 28.

96 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology

Included in these metaphysical principles [according to David Ray Griffin] are the basic causal principles involved in the causal relations between actual entities, including God and other actual entities—which is why divine causality in the world is always an exemplification of, never an interruption of, these principles.24

Griffin’s claim is that the principles that govern the inherent process of actual entities apply to God also. These principles are fundamental to all realities, including God himself. In other words, God himself is subject to the same natural laws and principles that govern the entire universe. As Whitehead put it, God may not be “treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.” 25 Process philosophers and theologians are adamant about this point. For them, any notion of God that does not harmonize with their metaphysical principles must be rejected on the charge of “incoherence.” Really their whole project is an attempt to form a rationally and scientifically “coherent” understanding of “God.” But by subjecting God to metaphysical principles they have constructed a naturalistic god, a god who does not transcend the “laws of nature” but “exemplifies” them. Indeed, they call God the chief exemplification of metaphysical principles. According to the doctrine of naturalistic theism, then, God is not supernatural so that he transcends the universe, but he is a natural part of the universe. He is not ontologically elevated above the world, but he is in the world and intrinsic to it. Thus, this view is known as “panentheism.” This term means literally “all in God.” All things are in God and he is in them. According to Alan Gragg, Charles Hartshorne frequently used the term “panentheism” to describe his view. Gragg goes on to say that “Hartshorne’s position is that literally everything exists in God and that God, like the universe, has no

24 David Ray Griffin, “Process Theology and the Christian Good News: A Response to Classical Free Will Theism,” Searching for an Adequate God: A Dialogue Between Process and Free Will Theists, Ed. John B. Cobb, Jr. and Clark H. Pinnock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), p. 6. 25 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 179.

April 2009 97 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal external environment.”26 Griffin puts it this way: “The term ‘panentheism’ emphasizes the idea that the existence of a world is internal to God—that it belongs to the very nature of God to be in relation to a world. What exists necessarily is not simply God but God-with-a- world.”27 Thus, process theology rejects the traditional teaching that God transcends this world and is wholly different from it. But it also rejects the notion that God and the world are identical (pantheism). God is neither of these. He is in all things. The analogy employed by Hartshorne to illustrate the relation between God and the world was that of the mind-body relationship in human beings: “Stated precisely, the analogy is that God is to the world as the human mind is to the human body. Or, the world is God’s body, and God is the world’s mind or soul.”28 Just as the soul and body interpenetrate one another, so also God and the world interpenetrate each other. God is able to exert immediate influence on all things in the universe even as the human mind is able to influence all parts of the body. The analogy, like all analogies, can be pressed only so far. Its main point is to illustrate that God is in the universe and united to it and yet not identical with it. Since God is in the world it is evident that He is also in space and time. Space and time are perhaps the most fundamental realities in the created universe. All things in the universe exist in space and time. According to process theology, God also exists within the parameters of space and time. The result is that the universe had no beginning and will have no end:

Hartshorne maintains that there is no eternity outside or above the temporal process. He asks man to live without eternity in any traditional sense and to be content with the everlasting-ness of temporal change…. the world, just as God, never had a real beginning and will never have a final end (my italics).29

26 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 91. 27 Griffin, “Process Theology,” Encyclopedia, pp. 365-367. 28 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 93. 29 Gragg, Hartshorne, pp. 17-18.

98 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology

Process theologians do accept the claim of modern science that the universe as we know it began with a bang some ten to twenty billion years ago. For them, that was not the origin of all things. The most fundamental realities are not protons, neutrons, and electrons. More fundamental still are the actual entities that lie beyond these particles. Even if the minutest observable particles originated ten to twenty billion years ago, there were still more basic entities that existed before that time, and that have always existed. Thus, Griffin states that naturalistic theism “does not entail [the belief] that our particular universe, which evidently has existed for only ten to twenty billion years, exists naturally, but only that some world or other – some plurality of finite actualities – always exists.”30 The particular universe (or “cosmic epoch”) in which we live has not always existed. But “some world or other” has always existed and will always exist. Before our current cosmic epoch there were “no molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, or photons, not even any quarks [theoretical subatomic particles, DJH]. There was a multiplicity of finite actualities…embodying no principles other than the purely metaphysical principles, which are instantiated in every world….”31 It was a time of chaos, and God existed with that chaos of undefined, finite actualities “embodying no principles” except “purely metaphysical” ones. He existed eternally (in the sense of “forever in one direction”) with that chaos and very gradually brought into being the universe as we know it. The bottom line in this regard is that God is not outside space and time, but he is within them. He always existed with the world, and together their existence will continue forever.

Dipolar theism Process theology is often referred to as “dipolar” or “bipolar” theism because it posits a twofold nature in God. Moreover, there are two senses in which process thinkers have posited this twofold nature. They have spoken of God’s “primordial” and “consequent” natures, and they have spoken of his “abstract” and “concrete” natures. Whitehead and Hartshorne held to both, though Whitehead emphasized

30 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 6. 31 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 30.

April 2009 99 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal the former, and Hartshorne the latter.32 This dipolar view of God is an essential concomitant of panentheism. Both traditional theism and pantheism are monopolar. They both assert that God has one mode of being: He is either ontologically different from the world or the same as the world. But panentheism asserts that God is different and the same; he affects the world and is affected by it. Thus, Gragg’s statement seems accurate when he says, “One will always misunderstand Hartshorne’s doctrine of God as long as he tries to conceive of God’s being as simple. His view is that the nature of God is irreducibly complex.”33 First of all, God’s nature is said to be “primordial” and “consequent.” This was the emphasis of Whitehead. Whitehead considered God’s primordial nature to be basically that by which he lures actual entities to become what is most satisfying to him. God is “the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire.”34 The primordial nature of God is conceptual, containing the “absolute wealth of potentiality.”35 It contains all the potential directions in which the world might go in conceptual form. God places these potentialities before the actual entities of the universe and tries to persuade them to follow his lead. But as primordial, God is not yet fully real. He lacks the actuality of all the potentialities within him and lacks consciousness.36 But these things are achieved in his “consequent” nature, by which he prehends the physical world. He takes it into himself, with the result that “there is a reaction of the world on God.”37 In his consequent nature, God is affected by the world and he evolves with it: “God’s consequent nature grows with the growth of the world.”38 In this sense, then, God himself is in process. He does not remain the same, but he becomes and evolves with the world and in response to the world. In the second place, God’s nature is said to be “abstract” and

32 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 6. 33 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 83. 34 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 180. 35 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 179. 36 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 179. 37 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 181. 38 Sherburne, Key to Whitehead, p. 227.

100 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology

“concrete.” This was particularly the emphasis of Charles Hartshorne. With this distinction Hartshorne tried to balance a “both/and” conception of God. In his abstract nature God is absolute, infinite, immutable, impassable, and creative.39 But this nature of God is merely an abstraction from God’s concrete nature. It is a description of God’s existence, which is itself “not a fact but rather the principle of possibility of all facts.”40 Thus, God’s abstract nature is not really real, but a mere abstraction from God’s concrete nature, which is the main thing. In his concrete nature God is relative, finite, changeable, passable, and created, i.e., the opposite of what he is in his abstract pole.41 In this pole God interacts with the world and is affected by it. He changes and suffers; he depends on the world and is created by it. Hartshorne claimed that one must maintain both of these poles in God. He said that monopolar theisms have erred by asserting one of the two poles and rejecting the other.42 Both poles must be maintained, even though they are opposites. Hartshorne claimed that this is not a contradiction but two different aspects of God, both of which are necessary. But one cannot escape the charge of teaching flat contradiction simply by claiming to teach two aspects. God cannot be finite and infinite. Those are opposites that cannot both exist at the same time in the same being. That is a flat contradiction, and it demonstrates the absurdity of process theology.

Creation Process theology rejects the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and asserts a certain creation out of chaos.43 The traditional view of God invariably includes the doctrine of creation out of nothing. As the Bible states in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God created the heavens and earth out of nothing.

39 Griffin, “Process Theology,”Encyclopedia , p. 365; Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 84. 40 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 84. 41 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 84. 42 Gragg, Hartshorne, pp. 84-85. 43 John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An In- troductory Exposition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), p. 65.

April 2009 101 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

He created something when there was nothing (except himself). But process theology denies this, asserting rather that God and the world always co-existed. There was never a time when one of them did not exist with the other. However, before our cosmic epoch, “the world” was nothing but a chaotic “plurality of finite actualities,” as Griffin describes it.44 Process theologians liken this primitive chaos to the account of Genesis 1:2, which states that the earth was “without form and void.” In that primitive world there were no observable things, but there were disordered actual entities. Creation, in process theology, is the gradual evolution of those disordered actual entities into the world as we know it over the course of billions of years. God’s role in creation is purely persuasive. We noticed this already in connection with Whitehead’s notion of “subjective aim.” The “subjective aim,” according to Whitehead, is the ideal or “vision for growth” that God places before actual entities. It is the lure by which God entices an actual entity to follow a certain path of becoming. After he establishes the initial aim, the actual entity may either choose it and follow God’s proffered path, or reject it and follow some other path of becoming. In the words of Cobb and Griffin:

[The] initial aim does not automatically become the subject’s own aim. Rather, this “subjective aim” is a product of its own decision. The subject may choose to actualize the initial aim; but it may also choose from among the other real possibilities open to it, given its context. In other words, God seeks to persuade each occasion toward that possibility for its own existence which would be best for it; but God cannot control the finite occasion’s self-actualization.45

This is God’s modus operandi in the world, according to process theology. Therefore, it is also his mode in creating. Since his mode of action is purely persuasive, it is clear that the universe as we know it could not have been created in a moment. It took billions of years for God to lure the primitive chaos into the complex cosmos that exists today. However, in the earliest moments of our particular universe,

44 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 6. 45 Cobb and Griffin, PT: Intro, p. 53.

102 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology

God’s persuasive power produced “quasi-coercive effects,”46 i.e., effects that seem to have been caused by an act of omnipotent power. The explanation for effects that are quasi-coercive is that at the beginning of our cosmic epoch God supposedly lured the chaos into a state of great complexity. But from that point on, “divine persuasion would never again, as long as this world exists, be able to guarantee quasi- coercive results.”47 From that point on, God’s power was limited by the freedom of the more complex actualities he had brought about. With this view of creation, process theologians claim to overcome the problems of atheistic Darwinism, which claims that evolution takes place purely from “the combined effect of random variations and natural selection.”48 The entire process in which one species evolves into another takes place through very tiny steps – a little change here, a slight alteration there – which take place randomly. Darwinians claim that this whole process is “explainable without appeal to any nonlocal influence [i.e., God, DJH].”49 But process theologians point out that this position involves insurmountable difficulties. The main difficulty is that it cannot account for significant jumps in the evolutionary process. Our experience of the world, according to process theologians, tells us that such jumps must occur if evolution is to be possible. We do not observe a range of development between one species and another. Rather, we observe distinct species. Thus, if evolution is true, there must have been periods of accelerated development in which one species made a significant jump into another. Darwinism does not allow for such jumps in evolutionary process, but process theology does. According to Griffin,

given the idea that God proffers initial aims to creatures, which consist of more or less novel possible forms for them to actualize, we can think of the saltations [significant jumps, DJH] as neither divinely determined nor wholly accidental but as self-determined responses to felt possibilities…process theology, while insisting that God works

46 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 30. 47 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 30. 48 Griffin, “Process Theology,”Encyclopedia , p. 366. 49 Griffin, “Process Theology,”Encyclopedia , p. 366.

April 2009 103 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

entirely by persuasive power, offers a robust doctrine of God as the creator of life and all its species, in that the first emergence of life and every emergence of a new species thereafter required a specific form of divine creative-providential activity.50

Thus the claim of process theology is that God lures an entire species to become a new and different species, and when His lure is accepted, the creature follows the new course of action and eventually becomes the new species intended by God. When the species accepts the lure, an accelerated period of development ensues—“the saltation”—at the end of which a new species emerges. In this way process theology claims to be a reconciliation of belief in God as creator and belief in evolution. However, process theology asserts that God is not only creative but created. In his concrete and consequent nature, God is in process of becoming. He is creating himself and being created by the world, even as the world creates itself and is created by God. They mutually affect each other in an endless process of becoming. Alan Gragg interprets Hartshorne’s theology this way: “In panentheism, God’s supreme relativity definitely means that God is a cocreator of man and the world and also that man is a cocreator of himself and of God.”51 The human race and really the entire universe create God just as much as he creates them. All things are interrelated with God, so that all of reality is literally a creative process. Everything, from God to the tiniest speck of dust, is in the process of being created. God takes into his own being all the experiences of mankind, so that they play a large part in creating the being of God. God experiences the suffering and the joy of men, and his very being is affected and even created by those experiences. According to Gragg,

[God] must share perfectly in miseries as well as joys of all creatures, preserving this painful awareness in everlasting memory. Thus he is radically dependent upon others for his happiness, for he must suffer when others either endure or produce suffering. The panentheistic

50 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 29. 51 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 95 (author’s own italics).

104 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology

God perpetually actualizes himself both in the sublimely blissful joy of sharing the joys of others and in the cosmic crucifixion of feeling supreme sympathy for the agonies of all creatures. He is the cosmic Sufferer.52

Thus, human beings and all creatures have a profound effect on God’s being. Their experiences are his experiences. He experiences absolutely all things in the universe, and those experiences become part of him. In this way too God is created and becomes what he is through the ongoing experiences in the world itself.

Process Christianity? We turn now to a consideration of how process theology deals with Christian theology. Despite the obvious fact that process theology con- ceives a completely different god than the God of Christianity, process theologians still claim to be Christian. Despite the fact that the process god arises almost entirely out of Whiteheadian philosophy, Griffin states that “to date, most, but not all, process theologians have been Christians.”53 He says that process theologians use their philosophical doctrines to deal with Christian themes. In fact, process theologians even claim that they teach the God of the Bible more faithfully than traditional theists. They contend that the traditional view is “glaringly inconsistent with itself and inimical to the biblical portrayal of God as the heavenly Father who grieves over His estranged children.”54 To their minds the Bible obviously teaches that God changes and suffers, that he reacts to the world and is affected by it. The traditional view, they argue, is the result of distorting biblical notions with the ideas of Greek philosophy. It is the result of refusing to acknowledge the biblical portrayal of God as suffering and changing and insisting on the notions of Greek philosophy.55 “Christian” process theologians claim to maintain what Griffin

52 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 97. 53 Griffin, “Process Theology,”Encyclopedia , p. 367. 54 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 81. 55 Robert K. Gnuse, The Old Testament and Process Theology (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2000), p. 4.

April 2009 105 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal calls the “primary” doctrines of Christianity.56 When one considers that process theology is derived entirely from worldly philosophy,57 it seems impossible that it could affirm distinctly Christian and distinctly revealed doctrines. Nevertheless, they claim to do so. One wonders whether this is simply an attempt to retain the vestiges of Christianity. One wonders whether this is done merely to attract nominal Christians who want to retain some of their Christian heritage. One wonders. The rhetoric promoting process theology in its literature and on the Internet certainly points in this direction. At any rate, we will look briefly at the process interpretation of the Trinity as one example of how it deals with Christian doctrine. The Trinity, like all of theology, is completely redefined by process theology. The Trinity of process theology arises out of its own philosophical viewpoint. Process theologians have constructed a Trinitarian doctrine out of three aspects of God: his primordial nature, his consequent nature, and his “creativity.”58 In his encyclopedia entry Griffin writes, “The divine threefoldness can hence be understood as consisting of divine creativity, creative love, and responsive love.”59 The “creative love” refers to God’s primordial nature, according to which he lovingly allures the world to become the best it can be. The “responsive love” refers to God’s consequent nature, according to which he is affected by the world and responsive to it. It is the nature according to which he experiences pain and responds in loving compassion. The third aspect, “divine creativity,” refers to God as the ultimate embodiment of creativity. As we have seen, process theology does not consider God to be the only creative one in the universe. The world itself has creative power. Nevertheless, God’s creativity is primordial and ultimate.60 These three aspects, then, constitute the process “Trinity.” It is quite obvious that this view of the Trinity is not at all in line

56 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 8. 57 And they accuse traditional theism of being based on worldly philosophy? [sic!] 58 Cobb and Griffin, PT: Intro, p. 109. 59 Griffin, “Process Theology,”Encyclopedia , p. 368. 60 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 26.

106 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology with the Christian dogma established at Nicea and Constantinople. The traditional Trinitarian dogma of three hypostases in one ousia is rejected. And yet Griffin still uses the termspersona and homoousios. He writes, “Applying the idea that all three ‘persona’ are homoousios, the point would be that the God known in the creation, in the incarnation of Jesus, and in our immediate experience is acting in one and the same way.”61 This statement is wrong and misleading because Griffin appears to be affirming three persons in the Godhead, when he is not. In another book, which he co-authored, we read: “When ‘person’ is taken in its modern sense, God is one person. When ‘person’ is taken in its traditional sense, two persons can be distinguished, God as creative love and God as responsive love” (my italics). What about the third? The third “person” is said to be the “unity” in which the other two are held together, which is not “another person in the same sense that the other two are persons.”62 That is to say, it is not a person at all. In fact, none of the so-called “persons” in the process Trinity are persons at all. A “person” is the individual subsistence and the self- conscious subject of a rational, moral nature. In the Christian Trinity, then, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are individual subjects who say “I,” and are the subjects of the divine thinking, willing, and doing. But the “persons” of the process Trinity are not such. They are mere aspects of the divine being. The primordial nature does not say “I” in distinction from the consequent nature. There are not three egos in one being. There is one being with three different aspects. This is just a modern form of the ancient heresy of modalism, according to which God is one in essence and person, but reveals himself in three different modes. Griffin even states that the three “persons” of the process Trinity are simply “three ways of knowing God.”63 When one considers what is meant by “person” in process theology, it is clear that the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity is denied. The process Trinity is just another example of a very ancient heresy, clothed in new philosophical garb.

61 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 26. 62 Cobb and Griffin, PT: Intro, p. 109. 63 Griffin, “PT,”Adequate God, p. 26.

April 2009 107 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Evaluation and criticism Process theology must be rejected entirely because it is philosophical idolatry. Some Christian thinkers claim that there are positive things that we can learn from process theology. For example, in an essay on process theology Norman Geisler states that “there are a number of very significant insights to be gained from an understanding of contemporary process theology.”64 Geisler is a leading representative of conservative evangelical theology today. He and others with him are too willing to “learn” from the “insights” of apostate and secular philosophy. Process theology is a false religion that sets up an idol god and promotes the worship of this idol god. Its god is crafted according to human philosophy. It is not the God of Scripture, even though Christian ideas and terminology are employed to describe this god. It is a god that has been tailor-made to the “needs” of modern man. Because we may have no other gods beside Jehovah (Ex. 20:3), we must reject the process god as well.

1. Process theology is based on reason. My fundamental criticism of process theology is that it is based entirely on reason. By this I am not referring to the epistemological debate between rationalism and empiricism. The battle between these two schools largely comprises the history of modern philosophy. The former maintains that humans have innate ideas from which they can deduce certain truths. The latter maintains that humans have no such innate ideas and can know nothing apart from experience. When I reject process theology as based on reason, I am not opting for the latter. Rather, I am rejecting all theologies that are based on the reasoning of man, whether these theologies are rationalistic or empirical. Process theology is based entirely on human reasoning. It is based on the reasoning of Alfred N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, to be specific. This is no secret. Process theologians themselves openly state that this is the case:

Because of its employment of Whiteheadian-Hartshornean process philosophy, process theology is one of the few contemporary types of

64 Geisler, “PT,” Tensions, p. 267.

108 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology

theology to be grounded in a metaphysical position in which theism is defended philosophically and science and religion are included within the same scheme of thought.65

Alfred Whitehead asserted the existence of God as an essential component of his metaphysical system. Whitehead believed in the supremacy of reason for discovering truth. In The Function of Reason he states that the supreme authority for knowledge is the interplay between real-world facts and speculative thought. He goes on: “But even this supreme authority fails to be final, and this for two reasons. In the first place the evidence is confused, ambiguous, and contradictory. In the second place, if at any period of human history it had been accepted as final, all progress would have stopped.”66 Thus, he states that speculative reason must be disciplined to transcend facts and “make thought creative of the future.”67 In his own philosophy, Whitehead viewed himself as interplaying between the observable facts of the world and his own speculations. Charles Hartshorne also viewed philosophical reasoning as “indispensable for theology.” He placed “more stress on sound philosophical reasoning than upon faithful acceptance of revelation.”68 In so doing, these men arrived at a certain “belief” in God through and on the basis of the interplay between “facts” and “speculative thought.” As Whitehead weaved his intricate philosophy of organism, he was led to see the absolute necessity of the divine being as the animating force of the universe, the force that gently nudges all things forward in this never-ending process of becoming. In process theology God’s existence and reality are asserted as necessary to the system. They are not something believed by faith. But any theology based on human reason must be rejected. First of all, human reason is faulty and error-prone. With regard to spiritual things, bare reason cannot demonstrate truth conclusively. Herman Bavinck states that knowledge supplied by general revelation, includ-

65 Griffin, “Process Theology,”Encyclopedia , p. 364. 66 Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Princeton: Uni- versity Press, 1929), pp. 64-65. 67 Whitehead, Function, p. 65. 68 Gragg, Hartshorne, p. 19.

April 2009 109 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal ing that obtained through reason, “is not only meager and inadequate but also uncertain, consistently mingled with error, and for far and away the majority of people unattainable.”69 This is certainly also true of Whitehead’s process philosophy. Secondly, if theology is based on human reason, then God is subject to the mind of man. A process theologian would have no problem with this since he believes that man is a cocreator with God. Man has power like God. Indeed, to some degree man is God. But to the pious believer this cannot be. God is not subject to man’s mind, nor is he merely an essential component in a metaphysical system. Thirdly, a god who is the product of human reason is simply an idol. And what is an idol but the product of man’s imagination? Many philosophers assert the existence of God. But their gods are all different. Each one is unique. This shows that their “gods” are simply the idols of the individual minds from whence they come. Each one is a product of the unique experiences and fanciful speculations of the particular philosopher. The god of process theology is no different. In contrast to process theology we must derive our understanding of God from revelation. The only way the true God can be known is through revelation. Bavinck states that religion is not even possible apart from revelation. The reason is that

the deity to which a given religion connects a human is a supernatural invisible power. It is inaccessible to ordinary human investigation; science leaves us in the lurch here. If we are to know something about God, he must come forward out of his hiddenness, in some way make himself perceivable, and hence reveal himself.70

Notwithstanding process theology’s claim to have true knowledge of God through scientific and metaphysical reasoning, it is not possible to know God unless he reveals himself. Indeed, God’s revelation of himself in creation stares process theologians in the face, although they

69 Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), Trans. John Vriend, Ed. John Bolt, p. 313. 70 Bavinck, RD, pp. 285-286.

110 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology suppress it and distort it with their depraved minds. Moreover, God has revealed himself fully and infallibly in the holy inspired Scriptures. That this is true must be believed by faith according to Scripture’s own testimony concerning itself, because Scripture “resists all naturalistic and rationalist explanations of its origin and attributes it solely to an extraordinary operative presence of God the Holy Spirit.”71 And as Bavinck goes on to say, Scripture maintains the distinction between God and the world. It does not present the so-called “naturalistic theism” of process theology but honors God as elevated above the world and distinct from it.72

2. Process theology is opposed to the God of Scripture. In light of the main tenets of process theology, it is clear that the god of process theology is not the God of Scripture. Nevertheless, many process theologians claim to be Christian and even claim to present a biblically accurate theology. Robert Gnuse claims that process theology more accurately portrays the God of the Hebrew Scriptures than traditional Christian theology. This is because traditional theology, in the judgment of the proponents of process theology, has “dismissed” the apparent sufferings and emotions of God as mere anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms. By contrast, process theology takes them literally.73 But despite these claims, process theology simply does not teach the God of Scripture. Norman Geisler makes this his primary criticism when he writes, “Perhaps we may summarize many of the criticisms of the panentheistic God by noting that He is not the God of the Bible.”74 This will be demonstrated in several ways. First of all, the God of the Bible is not only immanent with regard to the world, but He is also transcendent. Process theology denies the transcendence of God by its teaching of naturalistic theism, namely, that God is a natural part of the world. Scripture teaches that although God is “not far from every one of us” (Acts 17:27), he is still “high and

71 Bavinck, RD, pp. 353-354. 72 Bavinck, RD, p. 354. 73 Gnuse, Old Testament, p. 4. 74 Geisler, “PT,” Tensions, p. 280.

April 2009 111 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal lifted up” as the king of the universe (Is. 6:1). He is exalted above the heavens (Ps. 57:5); indeed, he is “above all” things (Eph. 4:6). Not only is his name excellent in all the earth, but his glory is set above the heavens (Ps. 8:1). The teaching that God is “exalted,” “high and lifted up,” and “above” the world means that God is transcendent with respect to the world. In his essence he is fundamentally and ontologically above the world. As Herman Hoeksema put it, “There is an impassable gulf between the world and his infinitely glorious being. He is God. He is the absolute. He transcends all the existence and all the relations of the creature.”75 This basic truth distinguishes the true God from that of process theology. Secondly, the God of Scripture is the sole Creator of the heavens and the earth. He is exalted above the universe because He created it. This too is denied by process theology. But Scripture is clear that God alone created all things by the word of His power. The very first verse of the Bible states, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” and all the rest of Scripture expresses its hearty agreement (e.g., Ps. 33:6-9; Heb. 11:3; II Pet. 3:5; Rev. 4:11). The narrative in Genesis 1 makes clear that this was the beginning of all things because God created them out of nothing. God created time because this was the ultimate and absolute “beginning” of all things. If it was the beginning in an absolute sense, then there was no time “before” the beginning. God could create time because He is outside of time as the eternal one. This is denied by process theology too. But the “in the beginning” of Genesis 1 clearly teaches that God is the eternal Creator of time. God created space too, because the space that makes up the heaven and earth is essential to them. Before the beginning there was no spatial universe as we know it. Process theology’s notion that God is within space and time is biblically untenable. Moreover, Genesis 1 very clearly explains that God created all the realities of the universe: light, water, land, plants, animals, and man. There were no actual entities existing in a chaotic, primeval world, which were then lured to become our universe. God sovereignly created a mature universe ex nihilo in six, twenty-four-hour days. That is Scripture.

75 Herman Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 2004), p. 70.

112 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology

The rationalistic notion of process theology is completely unbiblical— indeed, anti-biblical. Thirdly, the perfections of the divine nature revealed in Scripture are denied by process theology. Process theologians deny God’s immutability and impassability. They claim that he can and does change and that he is subject to pain and suffering. They contend that Scripture speaks of God as changing and suffering in his very nature. But this is incorrect. If one claims that the biblical language speaking of God’s repentance describes his very nature, he faces innumerable contradictions. For example, in Malachi 3:6 God says, “I am the Lo r d , I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.” In James 1:17 the apostle states that with God there is no “variableness” (literally “change”) or “shadow of turning.” And in Deuteronomy 32:4 we read that God is “the Rock, his work is perfect.” In these and other passages of Scripture God is presented as unchanging and perfect within himself. He is pictured as a rock because his work is perfect. If he is perfect in his work, he does not change in respect to it. The god of process theology does change. He is not a rock but a river that is constantly changing and becoming, constantly flowing and altering its course. His work is not perfect, but he is always trying to actualize the greatest possible satisfaction in the world. The God of Scripture is perfect in himself and therefore he does not change or become. He has no need to become because he always is perfect. Therefore, in spite of process theology’s objections, we must interpret God’s “repenting” and experiencing human emotions as an- thropomorphism. God reveals himself in terms that we humans can understand. Hoeksema’s words are instructive here: “We must remember that the eternal and immutable God reveals himself in time, and that which is thus revealed to us in a succession of moments is eternally and unchangeably in the mind of God.”76 But when explaining these expressions we must not simply call them anthropomorphisms. God is revealing something about himself in these things. God is revealing something to us when he speaks of his “hand” and “eyes.” He is revealing something concerning himself when he speaks of himself as “grieving.” Our human faculties and experiences are reflections,

76 Hoeksema, RD, p. 110.

April 2009 113 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal vague though they may be, of God’s nature, which allow us to know something about God himself. But the great difference is that God’s nature is unchanging, whereas we creatures constantly change and develop. Process theologians also deny God’s independence and omnipo- tence. They claim that God is dependent for his existence and happiness on the world itself. He does not exist purely in and of himself, but his existence is inextricably bound up with the existence of the world. Therefore, he does not have sovereign power over the world either. The world has power to create itself and God. The future of both God and the world is open to an infinite number of possibilities, and God cannot completely control which is actualized. This is a gross deviation from the true God of Scripture. In Acts 17:25 we read that God does not need “anything, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.” In Romans 11:36 the apostle states about God that “of him, and through him, and to him are all things.” The name of God is “Jehovah,” which means I AM THAT I AM. God is not dependent on anything for his existence. He is what he is in himself. Moreover, as the absolutely independent being, God has sovereign and omnipotent power over all things. This is the clear teaching of Scripture. In Psalm 115:3 the psalmist writes, “Our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased.” God does not lure or try to persuade the world to do what pleases him, but he does what pleases him. He is able to do his will because he is the “Lord God Almighty,” as Scripture so frequently exclaims (e.g., II Cor. 6:18; Rev. 4:8). He has almighty power, so that he is able to do whatever he wills to do. That is the God of Scripture. But that is not the God of process theology.

Conclusion Because of process theology’s radical departure from the theology of the Bible, it has not made significant inroads into Reformed Christianity. But process theology has made inroads into liberal Prot- estantism. For example, it has exerted great influence on denominations like the United Methodist Church and United Church of Christ. John B. Cobb states that “process theists are more often members of

114 Vol. 42, No. 2 Process Theology old-line denominations and seek to give content and assurance to the waning beliefs of their members.”77 The beliefs of the members of these churches are waning because they no longer believe the truth of Scripture. They seek rational and scientific explanations for reality. They are nominal Christians who represent modern man, who is lost on the seas of rationalism, scientism, and existentialism. The openness of process theology to the theories of modern science makes it very attractive to many people. In it they see a way to reconcile their “Christian” beliefs and their faith in science. Process theology is an elastic, flexible religion that is not bound by Scripture but receptive to the contributions of science and philosophy, as well as other religions. Accordingly, process theologians are also promoters of religious plu- ralism and tolerance among the world’s religions.78 But although this is the current situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we must not assume that process theology will never penetrate the realm of conservative Christianity. A number of evangelicals already express that there are positive aspects to process theology, things from which we may learn. Moreover, the virtually ubiquitous acceptance of theistic evolution in Reformed and Presbyte- rian circles points out that conservative Christians have already opened the door to the ultimate authority of science and reason. Today theistic evolution and open theism are sinking their roots even more deeply into the soil of Protestant evangelical Christianity. If Reformed and Presbyterian churches do not repent of this despicable abandonment of the faith, they will eventually embrace process theology. Like the faithless Israelites of old, they will forsake Jehovah God and follow after the gods of the heathen. We have a high calling to maintain the truth of Scripture over against this terrible apostasy. May God be gracious to us that we may be faithful unto the end. l

77 John B. Cobb, Jr., “Introduction,” Adequate God, p. xiv. 78 Griffin, “Process Theology,”Encyclopedia , pp. 366-367.

April 2009 115 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena. Vol. 1. Trans. John Vriend. Ed. John Bolt. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003. Cobb, John B., Jr. and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: an Intro- ductory Exposition. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976. Geisler, Norman. “Process Theology.” Tensions in Contemporary Theology. Ed. Stanley N. Gundry and Alan F. Johnson. Chicago: Moody Press, 1976. Gnuse, Robert. The Old Testament and Process Theology. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2000. Gragg, Alan. Makers of the Modern Theological Mind: Charles Hartshorne. Ed. Bob E. Patterson. Waco, TX: Word Books, Publisher, 1973. Griffin, David Ray. “Process Philosophy” and “Process Theology.” The Encyclopedia of Christianity. Ed. Erwin Fahlbusch, et. al. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005. _____. “Process Theology and the Christian Good News: A Response to Classical Free Will Theism.” Searching for an Adequate God: A Dialogue Between Process and Free Will Theists. Ed. John B. Cobb, Jr. and Clark H. Pinnock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000. Hoeksema, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 1. 2nd Ed. Grand Rapids, MI: RFPA, 2004. Sherburne, Donald W., Ed. A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmol- ogy, Corrected Edition. New York: The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan Publishing, 1978. _____. The Function of Reason. Princeton: University Press, 1929.

116 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews Book Reviews

Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, Herman Bav- inck, ed. John Bolt, tr. John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008. 944 pages. $50.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8010-2657-7. [Reviewed by David J. Engelsma.]

This large and theologi- interested, in the secular literature cally solid volume represents the on contemporary culture, will- culmination of the huge project ingly bound by the Reformed begun by a few men in several Re- confessions, and deeply and formed denominations in 1994: thoroughly biblical. the translation into English for the To read Bavinck is an educa- first time and publication of Her- tion and a joy for all who love the man Bavinck’s Gereformeerde Reformed faith. Dogmatiek. To this project, from The contents of this conclud- the beginning, a goodly number ing volume are rich: the doctrine of Protestant Reformed men have of salvation; the doctrine of the contributed liberally, both finan- church; and the doctrine of the last cially and in other ways. things. The section on the Bible’s Herman Bavinck was pro- teaching concerning the return of fessor of dogmatics, first in the Christ and the end of all things Christian Reformed Church (in was earlier published in English the Netherlands) at Kampen from by the Dutch Reformed Transla- 1882 to 1902 and from 1902 to tion Society, the society formed for his death in 1921 in the Reformed the express purpose of translating Churches in the Netherlands and publishing Bavinck, as the (GKN) at Amsterdam. paperback book, The Last Things. As a dogmatician, Bavinck In addition, volume four contains was steeped in the Reformed the Scripture, name, and subject tradition from Calvin on, famil- indices of all four volumes. iar with the early church fathers, The Reformed theology knowledgeable of the other main taught and defended in this book branches of the Christian religion, is for the most part familiar to particularly the Roman Catholic readers of this journal. Essen- Church and theological modern- tially, it is the doctrine of Calvin ism, well-read, and very much and the Reformed confessions,

April 2009 117 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal although Bavinck has developed free, omnipotent, and insuperable, the truth and put his own stamp on is the heart of the gospel” (87). Reformed dogmatics. Fundamen- Faith, for Bavinck, is not “a tally, it is the theology of Herman condition, a work, which alone Hoeksema, although Hoeksema turns a possible salvation into an also developed the truth, put his actual salvation,” but the gift of stamp on Reformed dogmatics, God, earned by Christ for the elect and purified Bavinck’s theology (36, 37). “Neither faith nor conver- of the dross of common grace. sion is the condition that in any way acquires salvation for us. They are Salvation only the way in which the benefits Bavinck’s doctrine of salva- of the covenant enter into the subjec- tion is a learned confession of tive possession of those for whom sovereign, particular grace. Re- they were acquired” (122). generation precedes faith. One Discussing “a universal call reason for this confession on the through the gospel” in light part of Reformed Christianity is of the Reformed confession of the Reformed Christian’s con- limited atonement and of the viction that “the salvation [he] election of some only, Bavinck had received was a gift of God.” does not compromise, indeed, Behind his activity of faith and boldly contradict, the doctrines of repentance as its cause lies the particular, efficacious atonement grace of God (65). And this grace and of predestination, as do the of regeneration is efficacious and contemporary advocates of the insuperable, that is, “ultimately “well-meant offer of the gospel.” irresistible” (82). In the “offer,” God “does not say The fundamental issue be- what he himself will do—whether tween the Reformed faith and all or not he will bestow that faith…. forms of Pelagianism and semi- He only tells us what he wants Pelagianism, specifically, Rome us to do.” The English transla- and Arminian Protestantism, re- tion, “wants,” is misleading and garding salvation is this: “At the incorrect here, suggesting, in spite end of all the interactions, who of Bavinck’s explicit denial in makes the final decision,” man or the context, that God “aims” at God? (66). “The grace of God in the salvation of all men without Christ, grace that is full, abundant, exception. The Dutch original

118 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews reads, “Hij verklaart alleen, wat courage to say that that outcome Hij wil, dat wij zullen doen, dat [particularly, of the external call wij ons verootmoedigan zullen,” of the gospel] corresponds to etc. (“He declares only what He God’s will and purpose.” (Bav- wills [that is, commands] that we inck’s use of the past perfect should do, namely, that we should tense is certainly fitting for the humble ourselves,” etc.). Bav- twenty-first century; this courage inck is making the classic Chris- has long since been lost; mostly, tian and Reformed distinction it has wilted before the slander, between the will of God’s decree “hyper-Calvinist!”) Otherwise (what God has planned according (and here is the fundamental is- to His good-pleasure) and the will sue in the controversy over the of God’s precept (what He com- “well-meant offer”), “God would mands of His human creatures). no longer be God. History cannot In his explanation of the uni- and may not be a sparring partner versal offer of salvation, Bavinck for God” (35-37). denies that God “aims…at the Although denying that the salvation of all.” If this were the universal offer is an expression of case, as was the teaching of Rome a sincere and gracious aim to save and the Arminians in Bavinck’s all to whom the offer comes, Bav- day and as is the teaching in ad- inck does go on to speak of bless- dition of the proponents of the ings for the reprobate through “well-meant offer of the gospel” this offer and of the offer’s being in the Reformed churches today, “repressive grace” (a singularly the preaching of the gospel would appropriate, odd adjective for a be “ineffective” and “useless.” strange grace). Nevertheless, it is An aim (which is the same as a not Bavinck, but editor Bolt, in a “sincere desire”) on God’s part for footnote, who speaks in this con- the salvation of all would imply text of “common grace” (38, 39). either the “ignorance or incapac- Of these blessings for the repro- ity [of] God.” In their confession bate in the preaching of the gospel that predestination governs the to them, as of a “repressive grace” universal “offer,” that is, the seri- or a “common grace,” there is ous external call of the gospel to not so much as one word in the all who hear, reprobate as well as Reformed confessions, whether elect, “the Reformed have had the “The Three Forms of Unity” or

April 2009 119 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal the Westminster Standards. Paul “being” (wezen) to the “well- speaks a different language: “… being” (welwezen) of faith and whom he will he hardeneth… and considered it attainable— willing to show his wrath, and to aside from extraordinary rev- make his power known, endured elations—only in the way of continual introspection and with much longsuffering the ves- prolonged and anxious self- sels of wrath fitted to destruction” examination. Instead of lead- (Rom. 9:18, 22). ing one’s spiritual life by this Regarding the gift of faith, method to the mountaintop, it Bavinck affirms as Reformed gradually deprived that life of orthodoxy that faith is assurance all certainty and robbed it of of one’s own salvation in Christ. all spontaneity. “Nothing more Calvin’s “description of saving certainly inhibits a feeling faith as the ‘firm and certain than continual meticulous ex- knowledge of God’s benevolence amination of the question [of] toward us’…can be considered whether one has it” (131). correct as well as complete.” “Es- sentially, what else is Christian There are few doctrines con- faith but the assurance—based cerning which most Reformed on God’s witness and worked in and Presbyterian theologians and our heart by the Holy Spirit—that churches need instruction more ‘the eternal Faith [sic; should be and to which they are more op- “Father”—DJE] of our Lord Jesus posed than Bavinck’s doctrine of Christ…is our God and Father be- the Reformed covenantal view cause of Christ his Son?’” (128) and rearing of the infant children Bavinck is here refuting the of believing parents. The con- Puritan and “further reformation” sensus of Reformed theologians error regarding faith, which, de- has been that “only elect children nying that “faith carries its own were as a rule regenerated before certainty with it,” has plunged, their baptism” (57). Elect babies and is still plunging, multitudes of believers, therefore, have the into doubt and despair. faculty, or “habit,” of faith before they actively believe: “If Nomistic Pietism, on the other they [babies] are children of the hand, erred when it shifted the covenant, they are also believers assurance of salvation from the before they can actually believe”

120 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews

(101). Reformed theology “ar- how vitally important the classic rived at the unanimous confession Reformed view of God’s inclu- that the children of believers were sion of children in the covenant as much included in the covenant is for healthy, spiritual rearing. of grace as their believing parents…. The Holy Spirit could The confession of regenera- grant them the grace of regeneration as the implantation of the tion…he did this consistently in new life principle, according- the children of believers who died ly, further holds within it an in childhood…the Holy Spirit excellent pedagogical value. It is not an incontrovertible also frequently did this in the case dogma, of course, that all of children who were born in the covenant children or even all church, grew up in it, and later elect covenant children have joined it by a personal confession. already been regenerated in Therefore, in general the children their infancy before or in bap- of believers should, in accordance tism. Reformed theologians with the judgment of charity, be have never held this view in regarded as elect and regenerate this rigorous sense. But they until from their ‘talk’ or their firmly maintained that such ‘walk’ the contrary was evident” a rebirth in early childhood (68). before the years of discretion So radically have contem- could take place, since the Spirit of Christ is not bound porary Reformed theologians to the consciousness and will and churches departed from the of human beings. They con- classic Reformed doctrine of fessed that such a rebirth in covenant children, so violently early life in fact often did do they condemn this classic Re- take place, especially in the formed doctrine as un-Reformed, case of children whom God and so much have they convinced took from this life in their Reformed people and, apparently, infancy. Finally, they held themselves that the classic, tra- firmly to the rule that we must ditional, confessional doctrine regard and treat all covenant of children in the covenant is children born and baptized in novel, heretical, and dangerous the fellowship of the church not as pagan children, but in that Bavinck ought to be quoted accordance with the judgment at length. It will also be apparent of charity, as true children of

April 2009 121 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

the covenant, until from their Church “talk” and “walk” the contrary “The Reformed linked the is evident. At this point we church most intimately with elec- cannot set forth in detail the tion.” Essentially, in Calvin’s great power and value inher- description, the church is “all the ent in this view for Christian elect collectively who are known nurture, the nurture that oc- only to God.” This is the “invis- curs in the family as well as that which takes place in the ible church.” “While election is school and the church. But the foundation of the church, it it characterizes Reformed only manifests itself in faith and education and upbringing in good works.” Thus, the church distinction from that of Ana- becomes visible (288-291). “The baptists and Methodists; main- Reformation posited the distinc- tains the bond between nature tion between the visible and invis- and grace; proceeds from the ible church,” and this distinction reality of the covenant of is right (302, 303). grace and baptism; believes in “The key mark of the [true, the unity and organic develop- instituted] church [is] the Word ment of the spiritual life; and of God” (312). fully recognizes that God does not always work faith and With regard to the attributes, repentance in the human heart or perfections, of the church, suddenly, but often—indeed the claim (and name) of the Ro- as a rule—causes them to man Catholic Church are spuri- proceed and develop from the ous. Rome is not the “Catholic” implanted life gradually, by a church: “Mutually contradic- psychological and pedagogi- tory are the terms ‘Roman’ and cal process (124, 125). ‘catholic’…. The name ‘Roman’ or ‘papal church’ expresses its It is noteworthy that Bavinck nature much more accurately than understood the phrase in the ‘Catholic’” (322, 323). Reformed baptism form, “our Both word and sacraments are children...again are received unto means of grace, according to the grace in Christ,” as speaking of Reformed faith. It is “Christ who regeneration and, therefore, as a administers it [the word] by the reference to elect children (73, Holy Spirit” (459). “God [also] 74). employs them [the sacraments]

122 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews to impart his grace” (470). The religious organization as a false personal power of both word and church. Indeed, Bavinck denies sacraments is the Spirit of Jesus that one leaving the Roman Catho- Christ (459). The Spirit does not lic Church for a Reformed church work by word and sacraments should condemn Rome as “false.” always “in the same manner,” that is, a gracious, saving manner: “In Those, therefore, who have accordance with the unsearchable come to believe that the Prot- good pleasure of God, he uses estant church is better than the that word for bringing people to Roman Catholic Church and repentance but also for hardening; that the Reformed church is purer than the Lutheran, the for the rising but also for the fall- Remonstrant, or the Baptist, ing of many” (459). must without condemning Bavinck’s application of the their own church as false, marks of the true church is weak, leave it and join the other indeed objectionable. Intent on (317-319). guarding against the forcing of consciences by men, he slights the This abysmal teaching ex- solemn duty of every confessing plains, in part, why the orthodox Christian to believe the truth of members of the Gereformeerde Scripture. His view of the many Bond in the Netherlands remained differing churches constitutes in the utterly corrupt and apostate an erroneous “pluriformity” of state church, the Hervormde Kerk, the church. Bavinck himself endlessly. A leader of the Bond, avows “pluriformity”: “Since the Dr. C. Tukker, once replied to my [sixteenth-century] Reformation question, why he stayed in the the church has entered the period state church of the Netherlands, of pluriformity.” Bavinck sug- this way: “Mijn moeder is een gests that a church becomes false hoer, maar zij is mijn moeder” only when the last believer has (“My mother is a whore, but she disappeared from it and that the is my mother”). It explains why last believer may leave only after the majority of the members of he has determined that no other the Bond and almost all the mem- believer remains. There is virtu- bers of Bavinck’s and Kuyper’s ally no possibility that one clearly Reformed Churches in the Neth- recognizes and heartily damns any erlands in the end went along into

April 2009 123 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal the merger church, the Protestant Old Testament prophecy the basis Church in the Netherlands (PKN), of their dream of a coming earthly, which has abandoned the Re- carnal kingdom of Christ in his- formed confessions, permits the tory. The Reformed interpretation teachings of any and every doc- of Old Testament prophecy finds trine, including that God does not the fulfillment of the figurative exist, and avows sodomy—a false language in a spiritual kingdom church. And, no doubt, it explains of Christ. why orthodox individuals stay in nominally Reformed churches in And this kingdom [of Messiah] North America that have long ago is sketched by the prophets in decisively repudiated virtually hues and colors, under figures everything truly Reformed, and and forms, which have all been are far developed in apostasy. derived from the historical circumstances in which they God’s word about the marks lived…. But into those sensu- and their application in Articles ous earthly forms prophecy 27-29 of the Belgic Confession puts everlasting content…. is radically different from that of Prophecy pictures for us but Bavinck. one single image of the future. And this image is either to be The Last Things taken literally as it presents Bavinck’s eschatology is amil- itself—but then one breaks lennial, not because pessimistic with Christianity and lapses Dutch theologians are constitu- back into Judaism—or this im- tionally prone to amillennialism, age calls for a very different in- but because this is the doctrine terpretation than that attempted by chiliasm (654-658). of the last things of Scripture. The New Testament views Bavinck’s theory of explaining itself…as the spiritual and the Old Testament prophecies of therefore complete and au- the future Messianic kingdom of thentic fulfillment of the Old Christ is distinctively Reformed, Testament. The spiritualization and Christian, and decisive against of the Old Testament, rightly both millennial errors. Both dis- understood, is not an invention pensational premillennialism and of Christian theology but has postmillennialism make their liter- its beginning in the New Testa- alistic interpretation of figurative ment itself. The Old Testament

124 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews

in spiritualized form, that is, the ways, and finally evolves into Old Testament stripped of its a general apostasy and the temporal and sensuous form, breakdown of all natural and is the New Testament (660). moral ties that now still hold back such apostasy; then [this As for the thousand years— antichrist spirit] embodies the millennium—of Revela- itself in a world empire that tion 20, they are “symbolic… utilizes the false church and denot[ing] the holy, blessed rest of apotheosizes itself by deifying the head of that empire. Christ believers who have died and are himself, by his appearing, then in heaven with Christ” (684). destroys this anti-Christian Bavinck, therefore, does not power in its highest and latest relax the vigilance of the church manifestation (678). of the twenty-first century by the promise of a future “Christianiz- The translation and editing ing” of the world and a “golden of volume four are consis- age,” or by the prospect of a tently excellent, particularly pre-tribulation rapture. On the the summations of the chapters contrary, he gives the church the by John Bolt. necessary warning of a coming Volume four ought to be in Antichrist and tribulation. the library of every Reformed minister of the word. The Scripture clearly teaches that Reformed laity will find the the power of antichrist has its book readable and profitable. own history, manifests itself at n different times and in different

Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation: Volume I, 1523-1552, compiled and introduced by James T. Dennison, Jr. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books. Pp. xii + 820. $38.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-60178- 044-7. [Reviewed by Ronald L. Cammenga.] This is the first volume of into English. Dr. James T. Den- a multi-volume set containing nison is editor, compiler, and in various Reformed statements many instances the translator of of faith from the sixteenth and the documents included in this seventeenth centuries translated volume. In addition, he has writ-

April 2009 125 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal ten informative introductions to The Lausanne Articles (1536) each of the documents that are The First Helvetic Confession (Sec- included. Many of these docu- ond Basel Confession) (1536) ments appear in English for the John Calvin, Catechism (1537) first time. Among the contents of John Calvin, Geneva Confession of this volume are theses presented Faith (1536/37) at various disputations, personal John Calvin, Catechism (1538) statements of faith, official con- Waldensian Confession of Merindol fessions of faith, and catechisms. (1541) The contents represent various The Confession of the Waldensians traditions in the Reformed branch of Provence (1543) of the Reformation. Thirty-three The Confession of the Vaudois of documents are included in this Merindol (1543) initial volume and are arranged Walloon Confession of Wessel chronologically. (1544/45) The documents included in John Calvin, Catechism (1545) this first volume are: Juan Diaz, Suma de la Relijion Cris- Huldrych Zwingli, Sixty-Seven Ar- tiana (1546) ticles (1523) Juan Valdes, Catechism (1549) Huldrych Zwingli, short and Chris- Consensus Tigurinus (1549) tian Instruction (1523) Thomas Cranmer, Anglical Cat- The Ten Theses of Bern (1528) echism (1549) The Confession of the East Friesland The London Confession of John à Preachers (1528) Lasco (1551) William Farel, Summary (1529) The Large Emden Catechism; or Cat- Huldrych Zwingli, Fidei ratio (1530) echism of the Immigrant Church The Tetrapolitan Confession (1530) in London (1551) Confession of the Vaudois (1530 or The Confession of the Glastonbury 1531) Congregation (1551) Huldrych Zwingli, Exposition of the Confessio Rhaetiae (1552) Christian Faith (1531) John Calvin, Consensus Genevensis Articles of the Bern Synod (1532) (1552) The Synod of Chanforan (1532) The Confession of Angrogna (1532) The reader will be impressed The (First) Basel Confession (1534) with the fundamental theological The Bohemian Confession (1535) unity, notwithstanding the geo-

126 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews graphic diversity, of the various their calling respecting the training branches of the Reformation, as of the up-and-coming generation. that unity comes to expression in Reformed ministers, theolo- the documents included in this vol- gians, seminary students, teach- ume. The great solas of the Refor- ers, and church members are mation (sola fidei, sola Scriptura, indebted to Dr. Dennison and sola Christus, sola gratia) are Reformation Heritage Books for reiterated again and again. As one making this rich resource avail- would expect, there is frequent able. We commend the editor and unequivocal denunciation of and publisher alike for this first Rome’s false doctrines, practices, volume and eagerly anticipate and worship—a testimony against the subsequent volumes in the set. the fatal compromises too many Together they have done a distinct are only too ready to make today. service in compiling, translating, Rome’s doctrine of free will is and publishing these Reformed banished from the Reformed camp statements of faith, a precious part as a scurrilous intruder. And the of our Reformation heritage. doctrines of sovereign grace, The usefulness of the volume grounded in God’s eternal decree would be enhanced by a set of of predestination, are confessed indices, but perhaps this awaits and vigorously defended. The the final volume in the set. concern of the Reformed for the A valuable addition to any godly instruction of the youth theological library! Sturdily and comes out frequently, with parents handsomely bound! Highly rec- and officebearers alike pointed to ommended! n

The Letters of Geerhardus Vos, edited with an Introduction by James T. Dennison Jr. Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R, 2005. 274 pages (cloth). $29.99. ISBN 0-87552- 187-8. [Reviewed by David J. Engelsma.] Geerhardus Vos was a Re- Theological Seminary in Princ- formed theologian, who taught eton, New Jersey from 1893 at Calvin Theological Seminary to 1932, when he retired. At in Grand Rapids, Michigan from Princeton, he was a colleague 1888 to 1893 and at Princeton of B. B. Warfield, William B.

April 2009 127 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Greene, Robert Dick Wilson, Vos invites, indeed demands, Caspar Wistar Hodge, J. Gresham criticism of a serious failure on Machen, O. T. Allis, and other the part of the Princeton professor. notables. One is loath to give the criticism, Vos’ wife was the well-known partly because of the maxim, Catherine Vos, author of The “De mortuis nihil sive bonum,” Child’s Story Bible. His daugh- and partly because Geerhardus ter was the wife of Dr. William Vos was evidently graced with Radius, my esteemed instructor the Christian virtue of humility, in Greek at Calvin College. which caused him to shun the Vos died in Grand Rapids in limelight. 1949. Nevertheless, the fault must The content of this book is not be condemned, both because Den- Vos’ theology, but letters he wrote to nison not only raises the failure, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, but also justifies it and because B. B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, this same fault in the Reformed Henry Beets, Ned Stonehouse, F. world of seminary professors W. Grosheide, Paul Woolley, and today contributes mightily to others between 1883 and 1946. In the triumph of false doctrine in addition, the book contains a few of the churches and, thus, the de- Vos’ poems. struction of the churches and the damnation of souls. The Life Vos failed to contend for the Prominent in the book is the faith in the hour of its crisis in introduction, a “Life of Geerhar- Princeton Seminary and in the dus Vos,” of more than seventy Presbyterian Church in the USA pages. The author is the editor of in the 1920s and 1930s. the book, James T. Dennison Jr., During Vos’ professorship at well-known in Reformed circles Princeton, theological liberalism as the editor of Francis Turretin’s got the upper hand in the Presby- Institutes of Elenctic Theology. terian Church, as evidenced by the Of this “Life” Dennison remarks Auburn Affirmation (of unbelief that it is the “most thorough ac- concerning the cardinal doctrines count of the life of Geerhardus of the Christian faith), and in Vos published to date.” Princeton Seminary, as effected The biographical sketch of by President J. Ross Stevenson’s

128 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews reorganization of the seminary. more every minister, and far more When J. G. Machen and others every Reformed seminary profes- went out to form Westminster sor, is called by God “earnestly Seminary in Philadelphia and the [to] contend for the faith” (Jude 3). Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Obedience to this call, which neces- not only did Vos stay behind in the sarily involves doctrinal controver- apostate seminary and denomina- sy and church strife, is also part of tion, but he also supinely submit- the seminary professor’s “personal ted to the wicked decrees of the relationship to God.” Calvin too, by liberals by signing the documents his own admission, was naturally a requiring him to knuckle under. shy and retiring soul, desirous only No one questions whether Vos of the quiet life of the theological understood what was happening, scholar. But he was compelled by or recognized the great issues. Farel and the Holy Spirit to sacri- The letters make plain that Vos fice his desires for the sake of the was fully cognizant of the events gospel and church of Christ. The and the issues. Reformed “Form for the Installa- Some of Vos’ admirers have tion of Professors of Theology” excused him by appealing to his charges the professor of theology age. This excuse is inexcusable. with the calling that he “caution [his The call to defend the faith knows students] in regard to the errors and no limitation of age. Besides, Vos heresies of the old, but especially of would teach at Princeton Semi- the new day” (The Confessions and nary for three more years after the Church Order of the Protestant Stevenson’s officially commit- Reformed Churches, Grandville, ting the seminary to liberalism in MI, 2005, 297). 1929. Vos would live for another Dennison’s attempt to iden- twenty years. tify Vos with the isolated prophet Dennison does not excuse Jeremiah fails simply by virtue Vos. He justifies him. Vos, a of the reality of the prophet Jer- descendant of pietistic old world emiah. Jeremiah took a stand seceders, was so consumed with against the liberalism of his day, his personal relationship with God boldly and publicly. He spoke that he shied away from doctrinal out, loudly and strongly. He be- controversy and church strife. came a “man of strife and a man of But every Christian, much contention to the whole earth,” so

April 2009 129 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal that every one of the liberals and whether in the gospel or in the apostates “doth curse me” (Jer. covenant of grace, for more hu- 15:10). The isolation of Jeremiah mans than only the elect (the er- was that of the dungeon, not the ror, in fact, that paved the way, in safe and comfortable study. And the late 1890s and early 1900s, for the reason is significant. When the more obvious liberalism in the Jeremiah was resolved to remain Presbyterian Church in the USA, quiet, because of the opposition as Vos observes in his letters at of his ecclesiastical foes, God’s that very time). word “was in mine heart as a I refer to the theology of the burning fire shut up in my bones, Federal [Covenant] Vision, that and I was weary with forbearing, repudiates and attacks justifica- and I could not stay” (Jer. 20:9). tion by faith alone and, with this The sin of Prof. Vos in the doctrine, every one of the truths of 1920s and 1930s at Princeton is salvation by sovereign grace con- the sin of most scholars in the fessed by Dordt and Westminster, nominally Reformed and reput- on the basis of the doctrine of a edly conservative seminaries conditional covenant of grace. everywhere in the world today. I refer to the astounding It may not be excused, much less denial of the inspiration of Holy justified. The truth of God is at Scripture by a Peter Enns, until stake, and the souls of men. recently professor at Westmin- The scholars mostly remain ster Seminary in Philadelphia, to deathly quiet and studiously in- which denial he gave brazen ex- active (and peacefully in their pression in his book, Inspiration apostatizing or apostate churches), and Incarnation: Evangelicals pursuing their personal relation- and the Problem of the Old Testa- ship with God and their gratifying ment (Baker, 2005), and to the de- academic studies, as false doctrine fense of his teaching this unbelief destroys the Reformed faith in their to the seminarians by a majority churches, indeed, as false doctrine of the faculty at Westminster. is taught and defended in the very It was the denial of inspiration seminaries in which they work. by the old liberalism of the late I refer, among others, to the nineteenth and early twentieth open and even official teaching centuries that occasioned the for- of a love of God in Jesus Christ, mation of Westminster Seminary.

130 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews

Eighty years later, the same her- west Theological Seminary 22, esy flaunts itself, and is defended, no. 1 [May 2007]: 38-46). at Westminster. Dennison himself has exposed The (Biblical) Theology this fundamental liberalism, that Although the book about is, unbelief concerning the Bible, Vos concerns his letters, not his at Westminster (and other “evan- theology, both the biography gelical” seminaries), thus showing and the letters themselves raise himself the rare exception—a the matter of Vos’ unique theol- scholar who does contend for ogy. The reviewer, therefore, the faith once delivered. Having has the opportunity to comment demonstrated that Prof. Enns and on this theology. Geerhardus others publicly teach that much Vos is regarded as the father of of the Old Testament is “myth,” an orthodox “biblical theology.” Dennison writes (ironically): By “biblical theology” is meant a theology that, doing justice to We will now learn the mean- the progressive nature of biblical ing of a Biblical text from the revelation and working exegeti- current mythological whim cally with Scripture, sets forth the of gurus like Dr. Enns and doctrine of God (in the broadest Dr. Longman and a whole sense, including all topics of the- host of Ray Dillard [Dillard ology) in a certain distinct period taught Old Testament stud- of divine revelation, or of a certain ies at Westminster until his writer of Scripture, for example, death—DJE] devotees. And out of it all, we will realize the theology of the first five books that the same acculturation of the Bible, or Paul’s doctrine of and liberalism that eroded the last things. ‘Old Princeton’ is now erod- About Vos’ orthodoxy, there ing ‘Old Westminster’ (not is no question. The biblical theol- to mention long-gone Fuller ogy of Vos was essentially differ- Theological Seminary and ent from that of the old liberalism. now Wheaton College and Vos’ own work in the field has other erstwhile once-upon-a- been profitable to the Reformed time bastions of orthodoxy) churches. His book The Pauline (“Old Testament Historical Eschatology was usually on my Books: A Critical Review,” list of required reading for the Kerux: The Journal of North- students in dogmatics. April 2009 131 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Nevertheless, biblical the- be made, consciously, in such a ology—the biblical theology of way that the resulting theology is Vos—must be criticized. Bibli- guided by and in harmony with cal theology as such, not only the the fuller and clearer revelation abuse of it by unfaithful theolo- of Jesus Christ in the New Testa- gians, must be criticized. ment. There is inherent in biblical No Reformed theologian may theology the determination to do exegesis of any part of Scripture, discover and set forth the theol- including earlier periods of revela- ogy of a certain dispensation of tion, with a view to determining the revelation without regard on the theology of that part of Scripture part of the theologian for the whole without regard for the “analogy of of divine revelation and especially faith.” Specifically, no Reformed without regard for the system of theologian may interpret any part truth authoritatively defined in the of Scripture outside the binding au- creeds, the Three Forms of Unity thority of the very systematic creeds and the Westminster Standards. of the Reformed churches. He has This method of theology defends sworn to the church and to God that itself by a very loud appeal to the he will perform all his work, includ- sole authority of Scripture and with ing his exegetical work, with an eye a thinly veiled accusation that sys- fixed on the creeds, within the (very tematic theology, particularly the spacious) boundaries of the creeds, systematic theology of the creeds, and in harmony with the creeds. is not the product of close, careful The insinuation of biblical exegesis of Scripture. theology that systematic theol- But no Reformed theologian ogy, particularly the creeds, is may conduct a study of any part not exegetically grounded, or of Scripture, or of any distinct insufficiently concerned with the period of divine revelation, or of interpretation of Scripture, is false any particular writer of the word (which is not to say that individual of God, apart from a deliberate systematic theologians may not be and controlling consideration of guilty of this egregious error). the whole of revelation. To put a In fact, no theologian is able fine point on it, every study of the to do the work of theology with- Old Testament, whether Moses, out regard for the whole of Scrip- the prophets, or the writings, must ture and for doctrinal convictions.

132 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews

The orthodox biblical theologian against the term “systematic will be influenced by his commit- theology,” to discontinue its ment to the doctrines of sovereign use and instead to use “bibli- grace. The heterodox biblical cal theology” to designate the theologian will likewise be influ- comprehensive statement of what Scripture teaches (dog- enced in his exegesis by his hatred matics), always insuring that for predestination, limited atone- its topical divisions remain ment, and efficacious grace. sufficiently broad and flexible What makes a critique of to accommodate the results of biblical theology imperative in the redemptive-historically our day is the use of it to dispar- regulated exegesis on which age the systematic theology of the it is based. This, it would Reformed creeds, especially the seem to be, is the ultimate Canons of Dordt and the Westmin- resolution of the relational ster Confession of Faith, that is, the question raised in this essay gospel of salvation by sovereign, (“Systematic Theology and particular grace, thus paving the Biblical Theology,” Westmin- ster Theological Journal 38, way for the teaching of a universal, no. 3 [Spring 1976]: 298). conditional, and resistible grace of God in Jesus Christ. The humble handmaid has Biblical theology—a biblical aspirations to become the lordly theology antagonistic to system- queen. atic theology—is an engine driv- Zeal for biblical theology ex- ing the movement of the Federal plains in part Gaffin’s enthusiastic [Covenant] Vision. promotion of Norman Shepherd’s Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., disciple wholesale attack on all the doc- of Vos and proponent of Vos’ bib- trines of grace as systematized in lical theology in Presbyterianism the Canons of Dordt in his The today, has given expression to the Call of Grace: How the Cov- inherent drive of biblical theology enant Illuminates Salvation and to replace systematic theology, Evangelism (P&R, 2000) and his rather than to serve it. resolute defense of the heresy of the Federal [Covenant] Vision at All this prompts the not entirely modest proposal, in view of the 2003 General Assembly of the objections that can be raised Orthodox Presbyterian Church in the case of John O. Kinnaird (for

April 2009 133 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Gaffin’s defense of both Shepherd effect, to “remove the Calvinistic and Kinnaird, as well as Gaffin’s doctrine of election from the sym- own beliefs regarding the doctrinal bols of Westminster and replace issues raised by the Federal [Cov- them with Arminian formulas.” enant] Vision, see Paul M. Elliott, The changes urged by the liberals A Denomination in Denial: An were “very radical.” Such was Evaluation of the Report of the the weakness of officebearers, Committee to Study the Doctrine “themselves orthodox,” that they of Justification of the Orthodox were willing to “put up with it” Presbyterian Church, Teaching the and were “broadminded enough Word, 2006, 27-41). to include Amyraldianism in it Reformed and Presbyterian [the ‘Calvinistic System’]” (132, theologians and churches willing 135, 141, 165; letters to Bavinck to remain faithful to the gospel of and Kuyper). the Reformation as systematized And what “Arminian formu- in the Reformed and Presbyterian la” did the liberals, in fact, insert creeds must examine biblical the- into the Westminister Confession ology critically. in 1903 in order to “remove the Calvinistic doctrine of election” The Letters from that symbol? The now con- With regard to the letters fessional and binding statement themselves of The Letters of that God loves all men without Geerhardus Vos, they are not exception with a love that desires merely of interest. Some of them to save them all. This, of course, are exceedingly significant. is the very doctrine that the Chris- I mention several of Vos’ tian Reformed Church adopted more important observations in as official dogma in its common the letters. grace decision of 1924; that the The movement in the Presby- Orthodox Presbyterian Church terian Church in the USA in the virtually adopted in 1948 by its late nineteenth and early twentieth approval and distribution of the centuries to revise the Westmin- report of its committee on “The ster Confession intended to intro- Free Offer of the Gospel”; that duce the “Arminian” heresy into almost all reputedly conserva- that creed (it was already in that tive Reformed and Presbyterian church). The basic issue was, in churches warmly embrace and

134 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews passionately defend as fundamen- me that isolation is the only thing tal Calvinism; and the denial of that can protect us against wash- which warrants the branding of ing away with the current” (142; the Protestant Reformed Church- letter to Kuyper). es as “hyper-Calvinists.” A serious error in the Chris- Also contributing to the apos- tian Reformed Church in 1891 tasy of the Presbyterian Church, the (when Vos was still teaching at apostasy that would become ag- Calvin Theological Seminary in gressive and official in the Auburn Grand Rapids, MI) was that many Affirmation and that would drive ministers viewed infant baptism Machen out of the church, was the as merely “a symbolic offer of the failure of the Church to exercise covenant on God’s side” to all the discipline upon the heretics. baptized infants, rather than as “a seal of the gospel promise,” which In the churches at large things is “unconditional.” These minis- look miserable. Church dis- ters, Vos noted, had adopted the cipline is fallen very much doctrine of “Pieters and Kreulen,” into disuse and what is more ministers of the churches of the the realization that it must be Secession of 1834 in the Nether- exerted dutifully has been lands. This covenant doctrine was lost…. They allow opinions to be expressed and spread “offensive” to Vos, since it was unhindered. Opinions which, an effort, albeit “unconscious” without any doubt, not only (in Vos’ charitable opinion), “to assail the Reformed doctrine brush aside the principle of the but also the army of Christian- sovereign grace of God…in the ity (184; letter to Kuyper). covenant” (147, 152, 153ff.; letters to Warfield and Bavinck). The same false doctrines that In closest connection with were destroying the Presbyterian the doctrine of infant baptism Church were also present in the that troubled Vos was the power- Reformed Church in America ful movement in the Christian (RCA). The great need, Vos Reformed Church already in the thought, was that “all the Dutch late 1800s to cut the covenant people of Reformed principles loose from election, that is, to [be] one, and could form a sepa- deny that God’s eternal elec- rate denomination. It seems to tion governs the covenant, the

April 2009 135 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal covenant promise, and covenant This same Christian Re- salvation. “The covenant,” Vos formed thinking about election wrote, “is employed to render and the covenant would offi- election harmless.” In order to cially and formally drive Herman do this, the Christian Reformed Hoeksema out of the church theologians reduced the covenant in 1924. The same deceptive of grace to a “conditional offer tactic of making Hoeksema’s of the gospel.” Election was still supralapsarianism the root of his adhered to by these men, but in supposed doctrinal error would name only. For them, election is be employed (when, in fact, his “something separate that may not foes opposed his confession of influence and have a lasting effect election, whether supralapsarian on any other field. I cannot help or infralapsarian, as governing the but think that this leads to an un- preaching of the gospel and the Reformed covenant theory” (149; covenant). The tactic is still be- letter to Kuyper). ing used, as witness Jelle Faber’s Vos’ letters indicate, and Den- American Secession Theologians nison’s life of Vos confirms, that on Covenant and Baptism (Inheri- Christian Reformed ministers se- tance Publications, 1996). verely and publicly criticized Vos Today, it is the men of the for teaching that election governs Federal [Covenant] Vision, the the covenant, on the basis of Ro- Reformed Churches in the Neth- mans 9. Their clever ploy was to erlands (“liberated”) and their represent Vos’ supralapsarianism as several daughters, and all defend- the object of their attack, when, in ers of a conditional covenant fact, as Vos observed, the real object of resistible grace with every of their hatred was election itself. baptized child who are vigor- Such was the vehemence of ously carrying out the project the criticism of Vos for his doc- Vos exposed, and suffered at the trine of the covenant that, if the hands of, in the early 1890s in criticism did not drive him out of the Christian Reformed Church: the Christian Reformed Church, “render election harmless.” it strongly influenced his deci- The necessary implication of sion to leave Calvin Seminary for which is: render the will of man Princeton (149, 160ff.; letters to exceedingly harmful. n Kuyper and Warfield).

136 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews

Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis, ed. David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2008. Pp. xvii + 506. $35.99. Hardcover. [Reviewed by Douglas J. Kuiper.] Commemorating the 500th teachings of Scripture as confessed anniversary of the birth of John and developed by the early church Calvin, Presbyterian and Re- fathers. Calvin’s purpose was to formed Publishing Company is instruct in the Reformed and bibli- publishing several books in the cal faith, and ultimately to promote “Calvin 500” series. To date, both godliness and piety. The essay this book and the smaller book concludes by examining the place by David Hall, Legacy of John of the Institutes in the history of Calvin, have been printed. theology, quoting and referring to As the title indicates, this the praises of many. book is a “collection of com- Chapters 2-19 contain sum- mentaries on Calvin’s Institutes” maries of various sections of the (xv), and particularly of the 1559 Institutes, each chapter being writ- edition of the Institutes. In his ten by a different contributor. The foreword, J. I. Packer asserts that chapters are arranged in the classic this edition was one of the won- order of the six loci of Reformed ders of the literary world, spiritual doctrine, which, as anyone familiar world, and theological world. with the Institutes knows, was not Calvin opened his work with the order Calvin used in presenting a prefatory address to King Fran- his material. Accordingly, although cis I; so William S. Barker opens Calvin did not treat the doctrine of this work with an essay entitled predestination until book 3, that “The Historical Context of the section of the Institutes is reviewed Institutes as a Work in Theology.” in chapter 5 of this volume; the Barker notes that Calvin wrote the examination of Calvin’s treatment Institutes in the context of persecu- of justification appears in this vol- tion, seeking “to demonstrate the ume before the examination of his orthodoxy and orderly conduct of treatment of sanctification; and the the Protestant movement” (4) in last chapter of this volume treats distinction from the Anabaptists. eschatology, which Calvin treated Calvin pointed out that the Reform- in book 3, before his treatment of ers, not Rome, were in line with the ecclesiology.

April 2009 137 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Some of the contributors sum- cably and eternally image of God” marize Calvin’s thought concisely and that if God (that is, God’s and accurately, with minimal image) “were ever removed from comment and analysis. Others us, we would cease to exist” (24). give more extensive analysis of Referring to the debate between Calvin’s thought in addition to Barth and Brunner regarding their summary. In some instances whether Calvin taught a natural they present Calvin’s thought theology, Oliphint argues that not only from his Institutes but Calvin taught that natural man also from other of his writings. could not come to know the true Other times they bring the studies God by His revelation in nature, and conclusions of other Calvin but that the regenerate man can. scholars to bear on the particular In chapter 3, “Calvin’s Doc- doctrine that they are treating. trine of Holy Scripture,” Robert ***** L. Reymond succinctly summa- Calvin sets forth the subject of rizes Calvin’s teaching regarding man’s knowledge of God not only Scripture’s necessity, authority, in his Institutes but also in various self-attesting character, credibil- of his commentaries. K. Scott ity, unity, and inerrancy. That Oliphint treats that general sub- Calvin did indeed understand the ject, and the more specific matter Scriptures to be inerrant, Rey- of God’s revelation in nature, in mond defends against the contrary chapter 2. Oliphint notes that Cal- position of some scholars. vin begins covenantally—treating Douglas Kelly investigates the matter of the knowledge of Calvin’s treatment of the doctrine God first in relation to man’s of God (chapter 4). After briefly knowledge of himself. Oliphint examining Calvin’s treatment of then summarizes Calvin’s teach- God’s spirituality and its implica- ing regarding the knowledge of tion for the prohibition of image God that all men have, how men worship, Kelly treats Calvin’s can have it, and how fallen man writings on the Trinity at length. perverts this knowledge. Kelly summarizes Calvin’s defense In treating this material, of the use of non-biblical terms to Oliphint appears to be speaking set forth the doctrine of the Trinity; more for himself than for Calvin quotes the significant definition of when he says that “man is ineradi- “person” that Calvin gives; and then

138 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews expands on Calvin’s defense of the of creation, Pipa defends him eternal deity of both Son and Spirit, against the assertion of Benja- rejecting the idea of subordination- min B. Warfield that “Calvin… ism. “It is precisely here in Calvin’s teaches a doctrine of evolution” clear distinction (though not divi- (126) and against the notion that, sion) between God’s essence and had Calvin been privy to the God’s personhood—and in how scientific information we have he applies it to the full deity of the today, Calvin would surely not Son and the Spirit—that his great hold to a literal six-day creation, contribution to trinitarian theology and to the idea of a young earth. lies” (75). Pipa notes Calvin’s treatment of R. Scott Clark analyzes Cal- angels and devils in connection vin’s view of predestination in with the doctrine of creation. Pipa chapter 5. He begins by noting brings out both the polemical and that the doctrine is a “catholic” practical points Calvin makes doctrine—taught well before Cal- in treating providence; the great vin’s time, and by many Reformers reformer was concerned to apply other than Calvin. Arguing that this doctrine to the edification and Calvin’s doctrine of predestination comfort of the believer. was exegetical, Clark examines In chapter 7, Michael Horton Calvin’s teaching on the subject writes of the paradox of Calvin’s as set forth in his commentary on view of humanity, in that Calvin the book of Romans. Arguing that speaks both of man’s dignity by Calvin’s doctrine was theological, virtue of creation and man’s cor- he analyzes the pertinent section ruption by virtue of sin. In deal- of the Institutes. And arguing that ing with Calvin’s view of total Calvin’s doctrine was pastoral, depravity, Horton indicates that comforting God’s people and Calvin refused “to accept a total motivating them to holy living, eradication of the divine image” he analyzes Calvin’s sermons on (157) and that Calvin taught that Ephesians. the “Spirit is at work savingly Comprehensive is Joseph A. in the elect, but also in common Pipa’s treatment of Calvin’s doc- grace toward the reprobate” trine of creation and providence (158). Throughout this chapter (chapter 6). Though Calvin says much is made of Calvin’s teach- little about the mode and process ings regarding common grace.

April 2009 139 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

That Calvin made statements that is, Lillback gives hints of his own lead some to conclude that he erroneous covenant view. Raising taught a common grace is beyond the issue of the covenant of works question; but Horton’s error is once and only once in this chapter, that he reads Calvin, who wrote Lillback asserts in his introductory in the 1500s, through the lens of comments that “an elementary a twenty-first century notion of form of the covenant of works common grace. The words that appears in Calvin’s writings” Horton later uses to assess the (169). And in surveying what debate regarding supralapsarian- scholars have said about Calvin’s ism and infralapsarianism could covenant view, Lillback indicates as well be used with regard to that some consider Calvin’s pre- the idea of common grace: “this destinarianism to be “incompatible is a later debate that can only be with the conditional covenant of anachronistically inserted into the Rhineland Reformers” (170), Calvin’s thinking” (164). but later concludes that Calvin A fascinating treatment of does “stand in accord with the Calvin’s view of the covenant Rhineland Reformers’ covenant is found in chapter 8, written by perspective” (204), implying Peter A. Lillback. Lillback notes that Calvin viewed the covenant the disagreement of scholars over as conditional. As I say, these Calvin’s understanding and use of are “hints.” On the basis of this the covenant (170-180), and cor- chapter, one would not be quick rectly notes that the covenant— to charge Lillback with having a particularly as established with wrong covenant view. However, Abraham—encompasses the reading this chapter in light of Lill- entire scope of salvation history back’s book The Binding of God: (181). He points out what Calvin Calvin’s Role in the Development understood to be the comparison of Covenant Theology (see review and the contrast between the old by David Engelsma in the Novem- and new covenants. He concludes ber 2001 issue of PRTJ) one sees that “Calvin’s covenantal thought in this chapter hints of Lillback’s is not unclear although it is com- erroneous covenant view. plex since he fully and rigorously Derek W. H. Thomas exam- grounds it in Christ” (210). ines the part of Calvin’s Christol- Fascinating though the chapter ogy that deals with Christ’s per-

140 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews son, natures, and office (chapter the intrinsic efficacy of the atone- 9). Thomas indicates that Calvin ment” (247). adhered closely to Chalcedon, “Justification and Union with and took issue with heresies Christ” (chapter 11) is written regarding Christ’s person and by Richard B. Gaffin. After ex- natures. In this connection, he amining how Calvin treated the defends Calvin in the matter of doctrine of justification in suc- the death of Servetus. As this cessive editions of his Institutes, volume is a scholarly work, most he underscores that, for Calvin, chapters containing scores of justification flowed from faith footnotes, it struck me as quite (union with Christ), and therefore odd that Thomas would make the God always bestows it with sanc- following statement, and give no tification. Gaffin also indicates evidence or reference to support that Calvin’s view of justification it: Mary was “a perpetual virgin was the biblical and Reformed in Calvin’s view!” (212). notion of the imputing of an alien Chapter 10, authored by righteousness to the sinner. Robert A. Peterson, treats “Cal- Joel R. Beeke examines Cal- vin on Christ’s Saving Work.” vin’s teaching regarding the Holy After giving a clear summary Spirit, faith and assurance, and of each section and subsection repentance (chapter 12). Noting of Institutes 2.16-17, Peterson that Calvin often makes paradoxi- makes four comments: 1) While cal statements regarding faith and many tend to emphasize either assurance, Beeke sets forth four God’s love or God’s justice in principles that governed Calvin in Christ’s death, Calvin equally making his statements. This section emphasized both; 2) Calvin’s is worth a more careful notice than I view of atonement contrasts with have time to give it in this review. Anselm’s; 3) Christ’s death was In chapter 13, after referring penal substitution; and 4) while to Calvin’s well-known threefold “limited atonement is a logical use of the law, David Clyde Jones extension of Calvin’s thought,” devotes a section to surveying Calvin himself was “ambiguous how the ten commandments were or contradictory” on the question used throughout church history— of whether atonement is limited or contrasting Augustine’s view of unlimited, “but that he maintained the law (grace) with Rome’s view

April 2009 141 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

(works). Jones notes that Calvin international influence for centuries treats the law in connection with after Calvin’s death, Hall devotes a redemption in Christ—for Christ is section to explaining how Theodore the fulfillment of the law, and gives Beza, Christopher Goodman, John the grace to obey. Jones closes Ponet, and others disseminated by noting that Calvin preached Calvin’s ideas. He concludes that the law pastorally, showing that “everywhere Calvinism spread, the gospel both empowered and so did its views of both respecting motivated us to obey. government and limiting it” (440). Chapters 14-16 are straight- Cornelis P. Venema begins his forward, section by section sum- survey of Calvin’s eschatology— maries of Calvin’s teaching re- particularly the resurrection of the garding ethics and the Christian body and life everlasting—with the life (chapter 14, by William Institutes (chapter 19). He draws Edgar), prayer (chapter 15, by on other writings and secondary David B. Calhoun), and worship literature to emphasize that Calvin and the sacraments (chapter 16, was averse to speculating about by W. Robert Godfrey). eschatological matters not set forth In chapter 17, Joseph H. Hall in Scripture; to defend Calvin over treats Calvin’s view of church against those who criticize his government, including a treatment view of the intermediate state as of the offices of the church, the being too individualistic; and to authority (“power”) of the church, emphasize that Calvin looked for and the authority of church coun- heaven in heaven, not on earth, cils. Defending Calvin against when Christ returned. critics, Hall emphasizes that Cal- The last chapter of the book vin taught the presbyterian form is an expansive bibliography of of church government to be the Calvin’s writings, biographies form demanded by Scripture. of Calvin, works regarding the David W. Hall treats Calvin’s cultural context in which Calvin view of civil government as set labored in Geneva, and other forth in his Institutes as well as works related to his theology in his sermons and commentar- and hermeneutics. An index of ies (chapter 18). Noting that the Scripture references, and an index extent of Calvin’s treatment of this of subjects and names, concludes subject is disproportionate to its the volume.

142 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews

***** This volume also alerts the To read an original work is reader to debates regarding and always preferable to reading a criticisms about Calvin’s ideas, summary and analysis of that that have arisen in the years after work. In that light, anyone who he wrote. has the time and interest ought to And it will whet one’s interest read the Institutes. to read the Institutes, in whole or But summaries and analyses in part. My interest was piqued have their place; and this volume to read again various parts of serves that function well. the Institutes—the sections on This volume is a good sum- faith and assurance, and on the mary of Calvin’s work. Good, in Christian life, to name only two; that in most instances it is faithful and more than once I pulled my to what Calvin said. Good, in copy of the Institutes off the shelf that it is not too short; the reader to find out whether Calvin really is given the substance of what said that, or whether the author Calvin wrote. And good, in that was faithfully summarizing him. it is not too long; were the book As a complement to the In- much longer, it would cease being stitutes, and not a substitute for a summary, and become a restate- them, this book serves a valuable ment of the Institutes. purpose. n

With Heart and Mouth: An Exposition of the Belgic Confession, by Daniel R. Hyde. Grandville, MI: Reformed Fellowship, 2008. Pp. xi + 543. $24.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 0-97936-775-5. [Reviewed by Ronald Cammenga.]

The Belgic Confession the fundamental doctrines of the of Faith is one of the beloved Reformation. It is the earliest of Three Forms of Unity, the three the Three Forms of Unity, having confessions that together form been written in 1561. And it is the creedal basis for Reformed the confession that contains the churches around the world. With most complete summary of the the Heidelberg Catechism and fundamental doctrines of Holy the Canons of Dordt, the Belgic Scripture. Confession gives expression to Daniel Hyde’s commentary

April 2009 143 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal explains the thirty-seven articles features of the book is the fact of the Belgic Confession. The that each chapter concludes with explanation is thorough, instruc- a few “Study Questions,” with the tive, and, for the most part, bibli- exception of chapter 6, which is cal. The Reverend Hyde, pastor undoubtedly an oversight. The of the Oceanside United Reformed “Study Questions” commend the Church in Oceanside, California, use of the book by Bible study provides a valuable resource for classes or discussion groups. understanding the doctrines that The book also contains helpful are articulated in this Reformed endnotes that add to the overall confession, a confession that is too value of the book. In addition, the often not given its due in Reformed author provides his readers with churches. Originally the chapters an extended bibliography, identi- of the book appeared as articles in fying helpful resources for further the Reformed monthly The Out- study of the Belgic Confession. look. Convinced that the articles The book lacks a subject index, deserved a wider distribution, the which would be a useful addition Reformed Fellowhip has brought in future printings and would en- them together in a single volume. hance its usefulness for research. The first chapter sets the his- No book of this kind should be torical background to the Belgic published without such an index. Confession, including a well- Included as an appendix is an Eng- written biography of its author, lish translation of the dedicatory Guido de Brès. The second chap- epistle to the Belgic Confession by ter provides an overview of the Dr. Alastair Duke. For some time, Belgic Confession, including the the editors of PRTJ have planned structure of the Confession. Chap- the printing of an English trans- ters three through thirty-nine treat lation of this dedicatory epistle, the articles of the Belgic Confes- which we also include in this issue. sion successively. The content of This dedicatory epistle has not been the chapters faithfully sets forth the readily available. Bringing it to content of the Belgic Confession light by means of these translations and demonstrates that the Confes- ought to enhance the appreciation sion, in turn, faithfully articulates of Reformed folk for the treasure the truth of sacred Scripture. and sacrifice represented in the Among the commendable Belgic Confession.

144 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews

This reviewer offers two main View is) appears in the third study negative criticisms. question at the end of this chapter: First, chapter 14, which deals “In line with what our Confession with the Belgic Confession’s actually says [emphasis is Hyde’s], treatment of the truth of creation, we did not deal with the days of makes allowances for theistic creation. Ponder that for a moment evolution, particularly in the and consider that neither the great form of the Framework View. ecumenical creeds nor the Three Although the view is not men- Forms of Unity speak to the issue tioned by name, it is clear that of the days of creation. Should this Hyde makes allowance for this be an issue that divides us as con- heresy, as does also Westminster fessionally Reformed, conserva- Seminary West (California), of tive, Bible-believing Christians?” which he is a graduate, and the (p. 160). United Reformed Churches, in This allowance for the heresy which he pastors. that denies biblical creation is The question of when God regrettable. It is also inexcus- created or how long it took able, both from the standpoint of him is a moot point for the the teaching of Scripture and the Confession and is not the confessions. Although there was purpose of what we confess. difference of opinion among the Despite the personal belief Reformers regarding the age of of many of the Reformers the earth, all recognizing that the that the earth was roughly six exact age of the earth is not given thousand years old, this never in Scripture, all were convinced entered the official Confession of the “young earth” view. Ad- of the Reformed churches. ditionally, all the Reformers were The purpose of the Confes- sion is to declare the wonder- agreed that the days of Genesis ful works of God, to put into 1:1-2:3 were literal, successive, words the song in our hearts, twenty-four hours days. All to join the saints around the understood the Genesis account throne in heaven not in specu- to be a historical account of the lating about days or the age of creation of the world, a historical the earth… (p. 156). account that rules out any form This same openness to theistic of evolutionary teaching. The evolution (what the Framework Framework View is heresy, and it

April 2009 145 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal is a heresy that will undoubtedly wording of article 14. One who work its leavening influence in insists on what the Confession the coming years in the churches “actually says” ought to grant and institutions that have made that. The command was a “com- allowances for it. mandment of life” inasmuch as A second criticism is the im- God’s promise was to preserve position on article 14 of the Belgic Adam in the life that he had in Confession of the teaching of the the Garden. Nothing more. To covenant of works. The article appeal to article 14 in support of reads, “For the commandment the false teaching of the covenant of life, which he had received, of works is unwarranted. he transgressed….” To draw out Notwithstanding these two of that statement the doctrine of criticisms, this volume is recom- the covenant of works, including mended. It will prove to be a its teaching of the possibility that valuable resource for anyone who Adam could merit eternal life by is teaching or studying the Belgic his obedience, is contrived and Confession of Faith. With Heart far-fetched. No such teaching and Mouth is a worthwhile addi- is intended or expressed by the tion to any theological library. n

Coming to Grips with Genesis: Biblical Authority and the Age of the Earth, ed. Terry Mortenson and Thane H. Ury. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2008. Pp. 478. $16.99 (paper). ISBN-10: 0-89051-548-4. [Reviewed by Ronald L. Cammenga.] To say that the heresy of evo- in the Christian day-school. The lution has made serious inroads broader assemblies put their stamp into Reformed and Presbyterian of approval on the error and pro- churches today is to state the obvi- tect those who defend it, many of ous. Like the Protestant churches whom are officebearers. Not only generally and the Roman Catho- the scientific community, but the lic Church, many Reformed and churches join in the celebration Presbyterian churches have made this year of the 250th anniversary of their peace with evolution. The Charles Darwin’s birth. By many heresy is boldly promoted from in the religious community the the pulpit, in the seminary, in the man who despised biblical Chris- Christian college classroom, and tianity is hailed as a champion of

146 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews free thought. And about his false The authors are to be com- teaching concerning the origin and mended for their insistence on development of life it is said that the primacy of Scripture over sci- there is room for believing both entific and geological evidence. it and the Bible. The man whose The defense of creationism rests body is interred in Westminster Ab- on the teaching of Scripture and bey has arguably exercised a greater the teaching of Scripture alone. influence on Western society than William D. Barrick, in his chapter any ecclesiastic or royal personage entitled “Noah’s Flood and Its buried in the same place. Geological Implications,” has this Coming to Grips with Genesis to say: confronts the error of evolution head-on. The book contains All study of the Flood needs chapters by fourteen Christian to begin with the biblical scholars who expose and refute record itself. Careful analy- the error of evolution. The book sis of the record in Genesis aims particularly at theistic evolu- 6-8 should be the only basis upon which anyone considers tion, the form of the error cloaked potential geologic implica- in the garb of Christianity. The tions…. Far too many evan- various forms of the error of the- gelicals have allowed the a istic evolution are described and priori nature of the biblical challenged: the gap theory, theis- text to slip away by making it tic evolution proper, the day-age subject to external confirma- theory, progressive creationism, tion (pp. 252, 253). and the framework hypothesis. Coming to Grips with Genesis is Throughout the book, the contribu- a refreshing defense of the literal, tors consistently take the position historical, confessional view of that the Christian view of origins six-day creation, as well as the rests on the clear revelation of God universal flood of Noah’s day in Scripture. While the findings and a young earth. The chapters of science properly understood are not written from a technical, support the teaching of Scripture, scientific viewpoint, but defend these findings and man’s interpre- biblical creationism and refute tation of them do not establish the evolution from an exegetical and truth of Scripture. Scripture as theological standpoint. divinely, infallibly, and verbally

April 2009 147 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal inspired is the only and ultimate framework view is unbiblical and authority for origins. represents an accommodation of This reviewer found a number the biblical view of creation to the of the chapters of this book espe- pressures of evolution. “Whence cially helpful. The chapter entitled Cometh Death? A Biblical Theol- “A Brief Overview of the Exegesis ogy of Physical Death and Natural of Genesis 1-11: Luther to Lyell,” Evil,” was written by James Stam- by David W. Hall demonstrates baugh. In this chapter, Stambaugh clearly that the literal view of the provides biblical refutation of the opening chapters of Genesis is position accepted by every form the historic view of the Christian of evolution that death was present church. Terry Mortenson’s con- in the creation from the beginning, tribution, “ ‘Deep Time’ and the and did not have its origin in the Church’s Compromise: Historical judgment of God over man’s sin. Background,” includes a clear The chapter contains an excellent repudiation of the principle of treatment of this attendant error of uniformitarianism. “Is Nature the evolution. 67th Book of the Bible?” by Rich- Coming to Grips with Gen- ard L. Mayhue explores the proper esis is dedicated to Dr. John C. relationship between special rev- Whitcomb, Jr., for many years an elation and general revelation. In ardent defender of biblical cre- this chapter Mayhue rejects the ationism against evolution. The view that “nature” is the 67th book book contains a short biography of the Bible, and rejects the posi- of Whitcomb, as well as a bibli- tion that special revelation is to be ography of his writings. interpreted in the light of general This is one of the best defens- revelation. An excellent chapter! es of the literal, historical, biblical Robert V. McCabe’s “A Critique account of God’s work of creation of the Framework Interpretation that has been published in recent of the Creation Week” is thor- years. Ministers, seminary pro- ough and penetrating. McCabe fessors, college professors, Chris- describes the framework view in tian school teachers, seminarians, detail and names its promoters and college students will profit in contemporary evangelicalism, greatly from its contents. The also in Reformed and Presbyterian book deserves a wide audience. churches. He demonstrates that the Heartily recommended! n

148 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews

The Lord’s Supper: Five Views, ed. Gordon T. Smith. Downers Grove, IL: Inter- Varsity Press Academic, 2008. Pp 157. $18.00. Paper. [Reviewed by Douglas J. Kuiper.] For fifteen years or more, of church history at Memphis publishers such as InterVarsity Theological Seminary in Mem- Press and Zondervan have pub- phis, TN. The Lutheran con- lished books in which several tributor is John R. Stephenson, writers from various Christian professor of historical theology backgrounds write an essay on at Concordia Lutheran Theologi- a doctrinal or ethical topic from cal Seminary in St. Catharines, the viewpoint of their own back- ON. Leanne VanDyke, academic ground, and respond to the essays dean and professor of Reformed of the other contributors. The val- theology at Western Theologi- ue of such books is twofold: first, cal Seminary in Holland, MI, in a concise way the reader learns presents the Reformed view. the position of different branches The Baptist View is summarized of Christendom regarding that by Roger E. Olson, professor particular topic; and second, the of theology at George W. Truett reader sees how that doctrine is Theological Seminary in Waco, being developed, for good or bad, TX. And Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, in the churches today. professor of systematic theology This is one such book. Its at Fuller Theological Seminary in editor, Gordon Smith (president Pasadena, CA, wrote the chapter of reSource Leadership Interna- entitled “The Pentecostal View.” tional for Theological Education) No question about it, the book asked the various contributors not was informative. Nevertheless, only to summarize their tradi- this book was a disappointment tion’s view of the Lord’s Supper, for various reasons. but also to relate that view to the person and work of Christ, to that The Pentecostal view. tradition’s view of the church, and Being less familiar with the to the work of the Holy Spirit. Pentecostal view of the Lord’s Sup- Presenting the Roman Catho- per than with other views, I found lic view is Jeffrey Gros, professor this chapter most informative.

April 2009 149 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Focusing on classical (not struggled with doubt about their charismatic) Pentecostalism, and salvation because of ongoing after noting that Pentecostalism physical illness, in spite of faithful does not have a unified view of praying” (143). Truth comforts; the church and sacraments, Kärk- distortion of the truth does not. käinen presents the main points How comforting, though, when of the Pentecostal view. First, by partaking of the Lord’s Supper Pentecostals prefer to speak of God’s people are strengthened in the Lord’s Supper as an ordinance their faith that Christ, having died rather than a sacrament, rejecting on the cross to take away our sins, the notion that grace is bestowed heals us by raising our bodies to by the elements themselves. Sec- be free of disease! ond, as to the theological meaning of the Lord’s Supper, Pentecostals Misrepresenting the view are Zwinglian in emphasizing that of one’s own tradition. Christ is not really present. At the Not as a whole, but on par- same time, Kärkkäinen speaks of ticular and significant points, both Christ’s spiritual presence. Third, Jeffrey Gros and John Stephenson he relates the Lord’s Supper to misrepresent the view that they the Pentecostal view of divine are presenting. healing, referring to I Corinthians Setting forth Rome’s view, 11:30-32 and Isaiah 53:4-5. Com- Gros says that Christ is present memorating Christ’s death is a “sacramentally” and “bodily,” and “healing event” (127). He further that the Eucharist does not com- notes that the Pentecostal view pete with Christ’s atonement, but of the Lord’s Supper indicates rather “sacramentally re-presents that “Pentecostalism…is not pri- it” and “perpetuates” it (19). He marily a ‘Spirit-movement,’ but specifically refers to the Heidel- rather thoroughly christocentric” berg Catechism’s assertion that (129). the mass denies the sacrifice of The Baptist contributor, him- Christ, as being that which Rome self a former Pentecostal, points would never say. Interestingly, out the mistake of Pentecostalism Gros indicates in a footnote that in expecting physical healing in his summary of Catholic teach- this life: “I have personally known ing is largely borrowed from of several Pentecostals who have quotes and paraphrases “of the

150 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews

Christian Reformed Dialogue with the Reformed position” (34; with the Catholic Church in the note—a point of comparison, not United States and Canada” (pp. of contrast); and the Baptist says, 16-17). To this point, he has said “Anyone familiar with Catholic what we would expect any Roman theology has to wonder whether Catholic to say. Gros’s interpretations of Catholic His misrepresentation is doctrine are the same as the mag- found in his treatment of tran- isterium’s or whether they are his substantiation. Gros says that in own interpretations, not necessar- explaining the mystery of Christ’s ily shared by the church’s magiste- bodily presence, the word “bodi- rium” (36). I’m in agreement with ly” should not be misunderstood the Baptist contributor here. to teach “a localized or fleshly Stephenson develops the main presence” (17), for Catholics deny point of the Lutheran view—the a localized or fleshly presence real, bodily supernatural presence of Christ. He explains the term of Jesus Christ. Two statements “transubstantiation” as being part indicate that he misrepresents of a medieval worldview based on Lutheranism: first, his statement Platonic and Aristotelian think- in a footnote that this real pres- ing. If we were to understand ence of Christ is not explained this today, he argues, we would by the omnipresence of Christ’s consider absurd the debate over human nature (52), and second, whether Christ’s body is present his statement that the Lutheran in the Lord’s Supper or not. view of Christ’s real presence Reading Gros, one is left with “could conceivably coexist with the impression that Rome does not Roman transubstantiation” (52). teach the presence of Christ in His Reformed believers judge both human nature at the table. This Rome and Lutheranism to be causes the Lutheran contributor “to in error as regards their view shudder when Gros also repudiates of Christ’s presence; but even Jesus’ ‘fleshly’ presence” (32), be- Lutherans have distinguished cause Jesus said the bread was His themselves from Rome on this body! The Reformed contributor point, by teaching consubstantia- considers Gros’ explanation of tion rather than transubstantiation. transubstantiation to be “quite Again, the Baptist Roger Olson helpful as a point of comparison makes this point in his response.

April 2009 151 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Insufficient explanations Specifically, no mention is made of the doctrine. of the Reformed denunciation Some contributors could have of the Romish mass, as found in used their space better to develop Q&A 80 of the Catechism, nor to the view that they were present- the longest article in the Belgic ing. Particularly I thought this to Confession, entitled “The Holy be the case with those presenting Supper of our Lord Jesus Christ” the views of Rome and of the (Article 35). Reformed churches. Both the Baptist and Pente- After setting forth Rome’s costal contributors refer to the view in five pages, Jeffrey Gros diversity of groups within their devotes more than eight pages tradition as a reason why their to telling us how Rome has been essay could be only a general sur- busy in ecumenical dialogue on vey, and not a real development of the subject of the Lord’s Supper. the doctrine. I would have been more interested in further explanations of Rome’s Scripture, anyone? view itself. Stephenson indicates that “all Presenting the Reformed contributors to this volume, along view, Leanne VanDyke gave an with our intended target audience, overview of the teachings of Ul- accept the inspiration of the Holy rich Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, Scripture and hence acknowledge and John Calvin, noting areas of its accuracy and submit to its au- similarity and difference. While thority” (42). In that light, two correctly arguing that Calvin’s weaknesses of the essays come view is “the most vital and fruit- to mind. ful for contemporary Reformed The first is a paucity of Scrip- traditions” (68), and while mak- ture references. The Roman ing some passing references to Catholic contributor does identify the Second Helvetic Confession those passages in which the Gos- and the French Confession of pel writers and Paul speak to the 1562, she could have done more matter of the Lord’s Supper, and to develop the official Reformed makes a few other references to view of the Lord’s Supper, not Scripture in his essay. Topping only as Calvin saw it, but as the the list of frequency of Scripture Reformed confessions set it forth. references, the Lutheran contribu-

152 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews tor makes about two dozen, and Lord’s Supper, “We are increas- coming in second is the Pente- ingly made one with Christ as we costal contributor with twelve. abide in him and he abides in us, The Baptist contributor makes and we are made one with another two explicit Scripture references, in the fellowship of the Spirit” while the Reformed contributor (148). The sentence is true, if the makes not one, except for refer- “we” is the true believer within ring to Jesus’ statement “This is the body of Christ; but because my body,” and even then gives no the editor refers it to Christians Scripture reference. of every stripe and background, The second is that even when in promotion of an ecumenical reference is made to a passage, no spirit, it is not true. substantial exegesis of the pas- It stands to reason that in a sage is given. book of this sort, each writer will As has been noted, the em- point out those areas in which the phasis of the articles is on setting various traditions agree. But that forth what a certain tradition the various writers point to these believes about the Lord’s Supper, areas of agreement as opportuni- but little explanation is given as ties for future “dialogue” shows to why it believes what it does on that the writers themselves are the basis of God’s Word. ecumenically minded. As this was the book’s main “An exercise in ecumenism” purpose, the one point it im- No doubt part of the reason pressed upon me most is that for the paucity of Scripture refer- Christians are more willing to ences is found in the purpose of discuss those things they have the book. It is openly and un- in common, than those in which abashedly ecumenical. “Hence, they differ for scriptural reasons. this collection of essays is an “Dialogue” is a nice word, indeed; exercise in ecumenism,” writes but dialogue will never resolve the editor on page 9. And he differences by leading to a deeper concludes that, though the differ- understanding of truth. ences in understanding the Lord’s Was it his ecumenical spirit Supper are “legitimate” (?) and that led Jeffrey Gros to speak as “substantial,” they don’t negate he did regarding Rome’s view the fact that by partaking of the of Christ’s presence? If not, this

April 2009 153 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal spirit did lead him to explain of various backgrounds partaking why the Lord’s Supper divides of the sacrament together with the Christians: “Because of our fierce sanction of their churches. Until attachment to Christ and our un- others agree with Lutherans that derstanding of the relationship Jesus is bodily present in His flesh of the church in Christ’s unique (“This is my body”), John Ste- mediatorial role in salvation” phenson will have none of it. And (14). We are divided because we rightly so, even if his exegesis is all love our Lord—the Lord com- wrong! mon to us all! As if the real reason The Christ who is Lord, and why children fight and squabble at whose Supper we eat, unites His the dinner table is their deep love true, spiritual church by leading for their father! her more deeply into the knowl- While the book promotes edge of the truth. This book an ecumenical spirit, it also in- demonstrates how far from that dicates the futility of looking knowledge much of Christendom soon for the fruit of ecumenical is. n dialogue in seeing all Christians

The Six Days of Genesis: A Scientific Appreciation of Chapters 1-11, by Paul F. Taylor. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2007. Pp. 221. $13.99. Paper. [Reviewed by Douglas J. Kuiper.]

Paul Taylor works for the or- tional yet scientific” explanation ganization “Answers in Genesis.” of Genesis 1-11. As a scientist who submits to the That Taylor does not attempt authority of the Scriptures, he to prove the Scriptures to be true views Genesis 1-11 as a record of by means of science is worthy literal history, believes that God of note: “We believe the Bible created the world in six 24-hour because it is the Word of God. days, and holds to the view that We don’t believe it merely be- the earth is relatively young— cause of being convinced by the about 6,000 years. This book is science” (sic, 24). He has a high a defense of that view; the author view of Scripture: “I believe considers his work to be a “devo- the entire Bible to be the Word

154 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews of God, authoritative, sufficient, not poetry, but historical narrative complete, and inerrant. In this (chapter 6). In chapter 7, dealing I include the Book of Genesis” with the creation of animals, he (16). He contends that when one shows how evolutionary theory is who studies science begins with biologically wrong. In chapter 16, such a high view of Scripture, “we dealing with God’s announcement observe that our scientific facts, of the Flood, he says that the Flood as we get to learn them, fall into was a global event. place” (20). Properly understood, Two specific evidences for science will demonstrate the truth repudiating evolution were in- that Scripture teaches. teresting. First, the fact that so- Having set forth these initial ciety observes a seven-day week observations, Taylor proceeds in (80-81). Taylor observes that chapters 2-9 to lead the reader the week is the only time period through the Scripture’s narrative with no astronomical basis (not of God’s creative work (Gen. 1), governed by the sun or moon). evaluating them scientifically. That being true, the evolutionist Chapters 10-13 treat Genesis 2-3. has every reason to try to make Each of the final eight chapters a six-day or ten-day week—and of the book are devoted to one some have attempted to do so. more chapter in Genesis, so that in But the week is part of God’s cre- chapter 21 Taylor treats the matter ation, and our observance of the of the tower of Babel as recorded week is demanded by the fourth in Genesis 11. commandment. That society continues to use the seven-day week Repudiating evolution. as a period of time is a testimony Demonstrating his conviction against its own unbelief. Second, that these chapters are to be taken Taylor finds scriptural evidence literally, Taylor rebuts the gap against a bronze age followed by theory (chapter 2); shows why it is an iron age, which idea is part of improper to appeal to II Peter 3:8 the evolutionist’s view of history, to teach that the days of creation in Tubal-Cain’s pioneering work week were longer than 24 hours with all metals (123). (chapter 3); posits that God created a mature earth (chapters 5 and 6); Scientific observations. and underscores that Genesis 1 is Generally, Taylor’s scientific

April 2009 155 Protestant Reformed Theological Journal observations in these chapters are atmosphere before the flood and easily understood and familiar to the amount of water after the flood one who is committed to the doc- (131-132). Second, he indicates trine of creation. Furthermore, he that hydrodynamic experiments makes scientific observations only have demonstrated that the size and when he thinks appropriate—not shape of the ark was exactly the best necessarily in every chapter. to withstand the great tidal forces Many readers who are not scien- of the flood (147-148). Third, he tifically astute will find this book does not entirely dismiss the idea easily understandable. of an Ice Age, but considers that it Once I found his scientific could not have lasted more than a observations too deep or technical few hundred years after the Flood, for me to evaluate well (54-60). and not covered more than a third Although Taylor believes that of the earth (170-171). God created a mature creation, he Overall, Taylor is sound in does not use this as his reason for his doctrine. He understands that explaining why we see the light of death is the result of sin, and sin is those stars that might be more than due to the fall, so that one error of 6,000 light years away; rather, he evolution is that it speaks of death appeals to a cosmological model before the fall. That Eve, being proposed by D. R. Humphreys, created out of Adam, cannot thus which adapts the ideas of Bernhard represent all women as their head, Riemann regarding the curvature as some liberals and feminists of space. I am in no position to argue, he sees. evaluate this model. However, I am unashamed to continue to Errors of doctrine explain how Adam saw the light and hermeneutics. of the stars by saying that God Throughout the book Taylor created a mature creation. gives evidence of doctrinal stands Some of Taylor’s scientific that the Protestant Reformed observations were new to me. First, churches would judge errone- he attempts a scientific explanation ous. Taylor judges that fallen for why men did not live as long mankind, even atheists, still bear after the flood as before, which God’s image. He speaks of the explanation relates to the difference covenant being one-sided (Christ between the amount of water in the alone saves us), but at the same

156 Vol. 42, No. 2 Book Reviews time consisting of an agreement. became the 1st month of Israel’s God’s covenant with Noah he year, and that Jesus rose the 17th considers to be one of common day of the 1st month—that is, on grace. He refers to the offer the same day as that on which the of salvation in two significant ark rested (167). Frankly, I have places—first, when God spoke to to study this matter more care- Cain after Cain had killed Abel; fully before coming to a definite second, regarding Noah’s work opinion on it. of preaching and building the ark. These errors do not detract Rather than considering these to from the book’s value. The value be offers of salvation to Cain and of the book is that it explains the the wicked world, the Reformed events of Genesis 1-11 in such a reader should view them as God’s way as to demonstrate that Scrip- pronouncing judgment upon im- ture and science, properly un- penitent sinners. derstood, do not contradict each While Taylor is usually sound other. Furthermore, the book is in his interpretation of Scripture, written in a simple style and in some of his observations involve plain language, so that it takes questionable methods of interpre- neither a theologian nor a scientist tation. to read and understand it. Indeed, Taylor gives the meaning of the book is recommended to a the names of the ten men in the wide audience. n line of the covenant before the flood, then puts these names together into a sentence that spells out a dramatic statement of the gospel (134-135). That the names are significant in their own right I do not dispute; that God meant the church to string them together to find a statement of the gospel, however, is farfetched. Taylor also finds significance in the fact that the ark rested on the 17th day of the 7th month, that at the Passover this 7th month

April 2009 157 2009 Calvin Conference “After 500 Years: John Calvin for Reformed Churches Today”

Sponsor: The Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary, in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of the great church reformer John Calvin.

Dates: September 3-5, 2009 (Thursday-Saturday).

Venue: First Christian Reformed Church, Byron Center, Michigan.

Speeches: “Calvin as Model for Reformed Ministers” Prof. Barrett Gritters “Calvin as Church Reformer” Prof. Russell Dykstra “Calvin as Expositor and Preacher of Holy Scripture” Rev. Steven Key “Calvin’s Doctrine of Justification” Rev. Angus Stewart “Calvin’s Struggle for Church Discipline” Prof. Ronald Cammenga “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Covenant” Prof. David Engelsma “Calvin’s Doctrine of Predestination” Rev. Chris Connors

Question/Answer session will end the conference. Everyone is invited! Plan now to attend! Contributors for this issue are:

Ronald L. Cammenga, professor of Dogmatics and Old Testament Studies in the Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary, Wyo- ming, Michigan.

Eugene Case, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Woodville, Mississippi (PCA).

Russell J. Dykstra, professor of Church History and New Testament Studies in the Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary, Wyo- ming, Michigan.

David J. Engelsma, professor-emeritus of the Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary, Wyoming, Michigan.

Daniel Holstege, third-year student at the Protestant Reformed Theo- logical Seminary, Wyoming, Michigan.

Douglas J. Kuiper, pastor of the Protestant Reformed Church in Ran- dolph, Wisconsin.